00316618525
by attackfishscales
Summary: When the FBI captures Neal Caffrey, infamous thief and con artist, they discover that he is a runaway slave. Now recaptured and sold to recoup his owners' financial losses, Neal schemes and waits for his chance.  After all he escaped once.  But Neal isn't the only one plotting his escape, and not all of his fellow schemers have his best interests at heart.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's note:** Written for thetammyjo, only took my five years to finish it. My thanks to duckie-duckduck on tumblr for the beta.

* * *

00316618525

Part I

His hands shot into the air as the army of agents in exoskeletons and flex shielding flooded into the building, laser guns pointed right at him. He and Kate broke away from each other, and he stood alone in the center of the warehouse, lacing his hands behind his head.

One of the agents strode forward, ahead of all of the people pointing guns at Neal, and the thief greeted him with a grimace. "Agent Burke."

"Neal Caffrey," Peter replied. "You're under arrest."

"I know." He could feel Kate watching as he stood there, his skin prickling too hot and too cold all at once. As he held his hand out to Peter, he could hear the click of every gun in the room being cocked. "Thank you, I never would have found her without you."

The agent took his hand, and Neal wondered if he could feel the blood racing just underneath the surface of his skin when he shook. "It's my pleasure."

His brain felt blank and heavy, like he didn't quite know how to hold his head up anymore. The handcuff snapped down and molded itself to his wrist. Neal let the agent who held it pull his arm around and hook the other cuff to his other hand, trapping his arms behind his back. "So you were all in that one little service pod out front. Can't have been comfortable."

"Didn't smell too good neither," the man responded, and Neal held in a relieved sigh. He could work with this. He could. He could get them comfortable, make them- lure them in. He just had to keep thinking.

They pushed and jostled him out of the warehouse and onto the thin strip of concrete between the building and the podlines, and he glanced back at Kate one last time before they shut the door behind him. She had just told him she loved him. He should be dwelling on that, right? But he had to keep thinking. But the gears in his head were jammed and coated with gum, stuck together.

He slumped down and kicked at the agent holding his arms, catching his foot. It slid out from under him as Neal broke away, trying to sling his arms under his legs so he could get them in front of him as he ran.

But there was still the army of agents, and he brought himself up short, holding his hands up in front of himself, hands open.

Agent Burke grabbed his elbow. "You know, Caffrey, I kinda expected you to be the kind of crook who came quietly." He waved for the agent who had been holding Neal's arms before. "Jones, get his other arm. Let's get him into the pod."

"Glad I can still surprise you," Neal gasped, letting them hustle him forward and shove him into the pod. Peter guided him to a seat and buckled him in, making Neal feel like a little kid, and just a little humiliated.

"Look, you'll be out in five years, tops," the agent told him softly. "You don't want a resisting arrest charge."

Neal let his head drop and nodded. Peter had no idea what he was talking about. The agent who Peter had said was named Jones pulled out a memory glass computer and picked up Neal's hands to press them to it. Curling his hands to keep them safe, he tried to pull away, but Peter smacked the back of his hands and Jones pressed down on his knuckles, forcing his hand open. The memglass buzzed under his hand for just a second, and by the time he pulled his fingers back, it was too late. It whirred softly, and Neal watched the lines and curves of the finger and palmprints shift hypnotically under the surface of the glass.

"So is that the new Scry 280?" Neal asked reaching for the memglass peaking out of Peter's pocket, trying to ignore the one in Jones's hands. "I heard those were-"

Peter smacked his hand again. "Behave."

"Just trying to make conversation," Neal said, trying to let his mask fall over his face, to call forth the bright, troublemaking cheerfulness that the FBI agents would expect. "Nice to finally meet you."

Peter tossed a lollipop wrapper at him. "We already met."

Neal wished the man would take his eyes off him for even a moment. If he could get to the door, if he could trick Peter into touching the door controls, he could...

Neal's lungs filled and emptied so fast. The air rushed through him. Peter put his hand on Neal's shoulder, alarmed. "Calm down!" But Neal couldn't. "Okay, breathe with me. In, out, in out, come on, I don't want you fainting on me, in, out."

Neal gulped and tried to follow along. The pod barreled along its cable, flying down between the levels of the Manhattan tower, past apartments and gardens suspended in the air. Mozzie was right, he shouldn't have come. he should have waited until he had known it was safe. He wanted to tell himself it was worth it, but he was never going to see her again.

The FBI had its own pod station. The pod hopped tracks and slid to a halt inside the complex, and when the door slid open, florescent light poured through. Neal shuddered. He had always assumed that if they got him into a pod and took him to the FBI office, he would have one last chance to get away, that the pod would pull up in front of the offices, and they would have to walk him in. He felt so cold. Maybe if he broke away and made it out of their reach, they would have to shoot him, and then it would be over.

Jones unbuckled Neal's seatbelt and gripped his arms. Swallowing, Neal stood and let him guide him out of the pod.

The memglass beeped in Jones's pocket. Neal started shaking.

Jones let go of him as two more agents came to take his place, looping their arms through his. "Agent Burke," Jones called. "Look at this."

"It popped?" Looking back, Peter narrowed his eyes. "What was he arrested for before?"

Neal thought he was going to throw up. He sagged to the floor when the two agents lost their hold, he scuttled away. Pushing himself to his feet, he ran, hands out, grateful that he had gotten them around to his front before so that he could move. Peter didn't notice until the other agents started shouting, his eyes on the stark black and white truth flashing across the memglass.

A slave. He was an escaped slave. All Neal could feel was the faint lines that the lasers had left behind when they had erased the barcode on his shoulder aching, and the sucking sensation in his chest, as if his ribs were caving in under the force of his fear.

The agents caught him and dragged him back. They didn't even draw their guns.

o0O0o

It occurred to Neal that there was nothing wrong with begging. Tears were running down his cheek, and distantly, he knew he should be thinking about whether it would be better to stop the tears or to use them, but...

His nose was running. He tried to bring a hand up to stem the flow, but they were chained together, and the FBI agents were holding his arms. They shuffled him through the hallways and glass walls, into an elevator and up to the floor for the Fugitive Slave division.

"Peter," Neal breathed, the word almost indecipherable through the lump in his throat, but the agent didn't look at him.

Peter walked over to one of the agents sitting at the desks all around him, and Neal watched them talk, voices too low for him to hear. The woman he was talking to got to her feet and came over to examine him. "This him?"

Peter nodded once. "He calls himself Neal Caffrey."

She pressed her eyebrows together and gave him a sideways glance. "Why would that be important?"

Peter didn't respond. "What's going to happen to him?"

She glanced down at her memglass. "Well, he's got a sell on capture order on him, so he'll be put up for auction. He'll probably go to one of the ozone building projects."

Neal's breath caught in his throat, then escaped as a sob. It wasn't like he hadn't known that was coming. It wasn't like any of the agents hadn't known that was coming. Escaped slaves were cheep.

"Oh. That's... What's the life expectancy on those?"

She shrugged. "Six months. He isn't going to be a problem for you anymore."

o0O0o

"So you got Caffrey," Sara said without preamble, swooping into his office.

Peter looked up from the forms on his memory glass, thinned and stretched to take up the entire top of his desk. "Yeah, we got Caffrey."

 _"Well?"_ she prompted as she bent over his desk, hands causing the documents on the memglass to ripple under their pressure. "Are you people going to charge him with the theft of the Raphael?"

"He's not going to be charged with anything," he told her heavily. She stared. When she opened her mouth to speak, Peter put a hand up, his head dropping down to hang from his neck, the effort of holding it up seemingly too much just then. Looking up again, he flicked one of the documents to her.

It stopped at the edge of the glass. Her eyes flicked down to read it, and when she finished, she stared at him, open mouthed for a long moment, before she tightened her jaw and gave him a painful smile. "I guess this means our temporary association is over." She held a hand across the table, and he took it. "It was good working with you, Agent Burke."

Peter exhaled slowly. "I'm sorry we couldn't help you recover the Raphael."

"It's okay," she said, too quickly, almost hostile. "I'll find it."

o0O0o

They took Neal into one of the glossy concrete cells with a medical cot in the back. The door locked behind him, and Neal grabbed for the lock picks in his pocket, but there was no lock on the inside, no control panel, nothing but blank metal. There was a hissing sound coming from the ceiling, and Neal put his hand over his mouth and nose to keep himself from breathing in the gas filling the tiny room. His ears buzzed and his head throbbed, his lungs burning with the effort of not breathing. Then his hand fell away, he gasped, and the room blurred and went gray before he could bring his hand up again.

o0O0o

Peter started walking towards the elevator before he even realized it. He pressed the button that would take him down to the Fugitive Slave division and marched back over to the woman who had told him Caffrey was probably going to auction. "Do you remember the slave I brought in earlier?"

She touched her memglass. "00316618525?"

He had to look down to see the picture on the screen. The numbers didn't equate with Caffrey. They were just a disjointed collection, not a cohesive whole that added up to equal a person. He'd always assumed Neal Caffrey was another alias, but he had always imagined there was some other name underneath. "That's the one. I want you to tell me what auction house was he sold to."

She gave him an odd look. "Someone else bought him before we could arrange a transfer."

"What!" Peter put his hand on his head. "Are you sure?"

She passed him the memglass and pointed to the record of sale. Peter swallowed and nodded, before turning around and leaving.

o0O0o

His shoulder hurt. It felt like he was waking up in bits and pieces, first his skin, which itched, then the rest of his body, then slowly, his mind. He could taste the knockout gas in his throat and on his tongue, fuzzy from the way his mouth was hanging open. He tried to blink his eyes open, but his eyelids were too heavy to move. He took a deep breath.

"Oh good, you're awake."

Neal tried to turn his head to the voice, but he couldn't move, which might not have been a bad thing given how badly his head was swimming. He tried to close his mouth, but it didn't happen. His fingers wouldn't bend. His breathing, the only thing under his control at all, sped up.

"Stop panicking," the voice cut in. "Once we're at my apartment, you'll be able to move again, and then, we're going to have a long talk."

Neal wasn't reassured. He could feel the pod moving around him and the seatbelt on his chest, and the cool cling of glass around his throat. And the burn in his shoulder that must be a new barcode, inked into his skin.

He waited with the woman who sat beside him, the one who had spoken, while the pod jumped level after level until it stopped and the woman unbuckled his seatbelt. Her fingers fell on the memglass collar around his neck and flicked over it in a quick pattern. His eyes snapped open. He lurched out of his seat towards the door, but the woman just folded her arms. "I've set it so that you have one minute to get inside the apartment before the chip locks you down again. If that happens, I'm leaving you out here all night."

Neal's hand flew down to the small of his back and the thin glass disk resting there, on top of wires that reached into his spinal cord. Back when he had escaped, chips like that were too expensive for any old slave. "Who are you?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Come inside and I'll tell you."

He followed her out of the pod and onto her front step and tried for a smile. "Lead on."

She opened the door for him, and as soon as he was across the threshold, she closed it again. "I programmed my apartment into your collar earlier. As of now, if you step outside this apartment, you will not be able to move. You will not be able to speak or close your eyes, you will be stuck on the doorstep until I decide to let you come back in."

"Who are you?" he repeated, afraid he was going to throw up.

"You remember that Raphael you stole in the summer of '05?"

"What Raphael?"

"The one you stole in the summer of '05," she said again, slowly, like he was a small child. "It was insured by my company. I want to know where it is."

"I don't know what you-"

"Sara Ellis," she finally told him. "I was working with Agent Burke when he arrested you. I know you stole the painting, Caffrey, I just want to return it."

He slumped against the wall, too tired to make it look elegant. "And what do you get for getting it back?"

She gave him a tight smile. "Two percent."

"I don't have it," he insisted. "I never stole a Raphael in my life."

"Really?" She walked over to him and pressed her face right up against his, pulled something out of her pocket, and held it up for him to see. "Well I guess I'll just take this back to work with me."

Neal tried to snatch it out of her hand, but she held it out of reach. It was long and thin, made out of gray plastic with a set of prongs on one end and a button on the other. "Is that..."

"We use these at work when someone chips a stolen slave." She looked at it thoughtfully, her voice deadpan. "Silly me, I carelessly let this fall into my purse this morning."

"And if I give you the painting, you'll take the chip off."

She put it back in her purse and tucked it into her arms, keeping her eyes on his hands. "I might be forgetful enough to leave it on the living room table when I go in to return something as valuable as the Raphael."

He pasted on an airy smile. "But I don't have it."

Opening the door, she turned back. "Then you better get used to this place. You're never going to leave. I have to go into the office now, to drop this off. Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone."

o0O0o

It was tempting to do something very very stupid as soon as she left, just to spite her, but his head was spinning, and he barely managed to stagger his way to the couch and collapse onto it. His back and shoulder stung each time the fabric of his shirt moved over the chip or the bandages over the barcode. He pulled himself onto his stomach and fell asleep, the sticky, bitter, chemical smell of the gas still lingering in his nose.

o0O0o

When he woke up again, it was still light out, but the sun had slid down the sky, into the west. His head was clearer, but the pain in his shoulder and back was sharper than before, a constant irritating reminder that he was caught, and just what they had done to him.

He took stock, piecing the world back together in his mind. He was wearing the same clothes they had captured him in, rumpled and streaked with dirt, but his own clothes, not a slave uniform, which he decided to think was a good sign. Of course it could have been that she hadn't yet come up with anything humiliating enough for her to bother replacing them. His fingers flicked open the buttons on his shirt, and he shrugged out of it, gritting his teeth as the fabric brushed against the fresh tattoo and the chip.

He stood up, ignoring the pain and checked the door. It was locked from the inside. He snorted, unlocked it, and then locked it again.

As apartments went, it was nice, with a kitchen off the side of the living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a former laundry room that had been turned into a linen closet, the hookups for the washer and drier left out in the open rather than plastered over, and a study, bookcases along the wall with real books, he wondered if she had inherited them or bought them, sculptures, real wood floors, and large open windows facing the outside of the tower, overlooking the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. He wondered in and out of the rooms, pursuing the drawers and closet, idly picking things up and putting them down in different rooms, but anything really interesting he figured, was going to be on her memglass, which was at work with her. There was a jack for an actual landline, but no phone, which left out calling Mozzie, or Kate, if he had her number.

Sighing, he gave up for the moment and pulled one of the books off the shelves. Sullenly, he flopped down on her bed.

o0O0o

"Cute." Sara stood in the doorway to her room, giving him an impatient look.

"Well I couldn't find anywhere else to lie down, so I settled for this." He flashed her a grin.

She glanced up at the ceiling and put one hand on her hip. "There's a futon and some spare blankets in the living room closet. Set it up in the study."

He didn't get up. "You trust me in your study?"

"Tell you what." Her smile was painfully sharp. "If you can find anything in there, you can use it."

o0O0o

He waited the next day until she was almost home from work. It wasn't that he didn't think the chip would work, it was just that he couldn't keep himself from testing it out anyway. He unlocked the door and walked down her front steps, and as soon as he landed his foot on the bottom step, his limbs seized up. His arms, swinging at his sides froze, his head, slightly bent, wouldn't straighten, and he was left staring at the concrete until Sara came home.

When she did, she didn't look surprised. "I expected you to try that yesterday," she told him, putting her hand on his collar and setting it to let him move again. "Back in the house, Caffrey, thirty seconds."

"Would you really leave me out here all night if I didn't hurry?" he asked, not sure he wanted the answer. The winds that high up whipped through the gaps in the walls of the tower and chilled even in the summer, and it was late fall.

"I might drag you inside. I don't think you'd enjoy that."

Neal jumped backwards up the steps and into the house. "I knew you were a softy at heart."

"If you freeze to death, I don't get my painting." She shut the door and dropped two white paper bags onto the coffee table. "I hope you like sweet and sour pork."

He grabbed one of the bags and broke the chopsticks apart. "So, what's going to happen if I never give you the painting?"

"Why?" she shot back. "Getting ready to cave?"

"No, I mean in a year, five years, ten years, are you going to just give up and sell me off to one of the ozone building crews?"

"If I say yes, will it get me the painting faster?"

He shook his head and pretended to try to smile. "It's just that it's kind of important to me, since I don't have the painting."

She speared a piece of pork with one of her chopsticks. "I would almost believe you if I didn't know how good a liar you are."

Neal's lip twitched ruefully as he turned back to his dinner. It galled him, having her know so much about him already, and knowing nothing about her, leaving her with that kind of advantage, but it didn't matter. It wasn't like there was anything he could do about it.

She followed his gaze down to the floor. "By the way, the chip works vertically to, in case you were planning on drilling through my floors."

"Wouldn't dream of it," he said, trying not to picture himself leaping through a hole in her floor, and falling, frozen, unable even to flail.

o0O0o

After he heard the door to her room close, Neal picked up his blanket and padded out into the living room. He watched the light under her door switch off, and leaned against the wall until he could hear her breathing even out as she drifted off to sleep. Stuffing the blanket underneath her door, he glanced around reflexively, as if there really might have been someone there, as if Sara Ellis had just pretended to go to bed to trick him, and could really be standing right behind him.

But she wasn't. He tiptoed into the kitchen and flipped the light switch scanning the counter top for her purse and if he were lucky, her memglass, but it wasn't in the kitchen, and when he poked around the living room, it wasn't there either.

He had a sudden mental picture of her holding it at her side as she walked into her room before bed, and he bit back a curse.

When he flipped the light switch in the kitchen again, the apartment went dark, and he walked silently back to Sara's door and collected his blanket. He tossed it through the study door, and it landed in a heap on his futon as he slowly, slowly turned her door knob and opened the door.

She slept with her drapes open, the moonlight and the constant yellow glow of the city towers seeping through. Her purse sat next to her on the bedside table. He foiled security guards and alarm systems all the time, he reminded himself, it should be easy to get past one person sound asleep next to his prize. Soundlessly, he moved across the floor and unhooked the magnetic clasp on the purse. Inside was a relatively uninteresting assortment of makeup, sunglasses and headache pills, and her wallet, with a few credit cards and IDs. And her memglass. He lifted it out and darted out of the room and into the study before trying to pull it open. The glass wouldn't move. It remained a dark, clear, little cube, stubbornly unresponsive no matter how he pulled.

Muttering under his breath, he made his way back to her room and forced himself to be silent again. The door slid open easily, and he crossed the distance to her bed without her even twitching in her sleep. Recklessly, he put the memglass in her hands, and when it started to glow, he snatched it back triumphantly.

Her hand latched onto his wrist. He almost dropped the memglass as she opened her eyes and pulled a laser gun out from under her pillow, leveling it at him. "Don't shoot!" he begged quickly.

She held the gun steady as she twisted his arm around behind his back. "What do you think you're doing?"

He swallowed, sweat breaking out on his forehead from the pain in his arm. "You told me if I found anything, I could use it."

"I meant in the study!" She pulled the memglass out of his spasming fingers. "Am I going to have to chain you up at night? Maybe I should just set your collar to the study. You want that?"

"I want to get out of here," he told her, his voice muffled by her mattress as she pressed him into it.

"Then give me the damn painting!"

"So we're back to that, are we?" he grumbled, trying not to drool on her sheets from the way she had his face pressed into them, forcing his lips open.

She let go of his arm and gazed over his head disgustedly as he twisted it out of the joint lock she had put him in, wondering if she had been trying to tie it in a knot, and picked himself up from the bed. "Just go to bed," she said tiredly.

Neal swallowed the saliva that had been building in his mouth and scuttled away.

o0O0o

"So I think I might have miscalculated."

Neal jerked awake. "Wha?"

She loomed over him, lying on his back on the futon. "I think we got off on the wrong foot. In fact, I think we should start over. Hi, my name is Sara Ellis, and you will call me 'Mistress'."

"Not in a million-"

She bent down low, until her face almost touched his. "If you don't I'm going to reset your collar so that you can't leave the bathroom, and I'm going to leave you there until you agree. How do you feel about sleeping in the bathtub?"

He smiled and cupped her face. "How do you feel about me watching you shower?"

She shoved his arms down hard enough to leave bruises. "I'll throw you out first, and you'll stay where I put you until I bother to throw you back inside."

He reached back to touch the chip. It felt warm under his fingers, but the skin around it was healing. "All that just to get me to call you 'Mistress', huh? Well you can forget-"

She held up a hand with a tight smile. "And while we're at it, you're a slave. You don't have a name; you have a number, and I'm going to use it until I figure out what I want to call you."

Neal's lip curled and he let it, sitting up. "You really think calling me some stupid name is going to get me to call you 'Mistress'?"

"This all ends any time you want it to, 00316618525," she said, pulling out her memglass to check the number. "Just give me the Raphael, and I'll let you go."

Neal flopped back down. "I don't have it."

She leaned over him again. "You don't have it, what?"

He closed his eyes and smiled cheerfully. "I don't have it, Sara."

"Okay." She grabbed his arm and braced it against her other arm, forcing it straight and levering him up painfully.

"Easy!" he yelped, and she swung him around, somehow using the motion to twist his arm around so that the pain eased.

She shoved him into the bathroom with one hand and pulled out her memglass with the other. Pulling it open, she brought up a blue and white floor plan of her apartment and traced her finger around the bathroom. It lit up a stark red on the screen as she grabbed him by the collar through the doorway. When she punched in the command, he had the creepy feeling that she was programming him, not his collar, not the chip in the small of his back, but him. He shuddered, trying to shake the feeling off.

"This is for your protection, until you learn how to behave yourself." She closed the door and spoke louder through it. "You're lucky I didn't shoot you last night by mistake."

He sat down against the white tile wall and listened to the sounds of her making coffee and scrambling an egg. Of course he thought, she was rich enough to have eggs for a normal, everyday breakfast. He wondered if she would make him one.

As soon as he heard the front door close, Neal climbed into her very deep tub and filled it almost all the way to the top with very hot water.

o0O0o

Later, when Sara came home, Neal was still soaking. "How many baths?" she asked, irritably.

He forced himself not to curl in on himself and try to shield his naked body from her view. He forced himself to keep his legs just a little spread and his arms draped over the edge of the tub, and he forced himself to beam up at her. "Five."

She rolled up her sleeve and plunged her arm down into the water between his feet, yanking up the drain plug. "I'm setting the water so that it needs my thumbprint to turn it on. Enjoy what's left of your bath. It's the last one you'll have for the foreseeable future."

"What about showers?"

"No."

"I'm going to start to smell," he pointed out.

"Stop whining," she growled. "If you start calling me 'Mistress', I'll open the taps back up."

Neal sighed. "And if I give you the painting, I go free."

"There you go," she said, putting a takeout bag down on the bathroom counter.

He sank lower in the water, pretending bliss. "Do I still get to flush the toilet? Because that's going to really stink..."

"Sink and toilet." She turned around and opened the door to leave. "I'm sure you'll find some way to abuse that privilege too."

"Your faith in me is really overwhelming," he called to the closed door and stepped out of the tub. Water dripped off him as he grabbed the takeout bag and pulled the meatball sandwich out of it. The water from his fingers and the steam from the bath made it soggy as he sank back into the disappearing water to enjoy his dinner in relative peace.

o0O0o

She came in late that evening and put him outside the door while she took a quick, perfunctory shower and changed into a tee-shirt and pajama bottoms for bed. He stared helplessly at the wall until she pushed him back through the bathroom door.

o0O0o

The next morning, he watched the door open, and Sara's hand slide a cup of instant coffee and a plate with two pieces of unbuttered toast onto the counter before it closed again.

o0O0o

Kate didn't have to try too hard to charm the guys at the front desk into letting her walk right upstairs. She told them she had a crime to report, and she really hoped that was a lie.

The elevator clicked when it deposited her onto the right floor. She burst out of it, scanning the rows of desks and cubicles for the man she was looking for, and when she saw his glass walled office, old fashioned, normal glass, she marched up to it and jerked the door open. "Where is he?"

Peter Burke looked up from his desk at the woman standing in the doorway. "What?" though he thought he had a pretty good idea.

Kate bared her teeth. "Where's Neal?" she demanded, wide blue eyes boring into him. "You arrested him, and he disappeared! I can't even find arrest records! Tell me what you did with him."

"How did you get in here?" he asked, startled.

Her expression didn't soften. "You think those guys downstairs were going to stop me?"

"You aren't afraid I'm going to arrest you?" he tried to distract her.

"Yeah," she scoffed, striding over to his desk. "If you had anything on me, you would have taken me in when you took Neal."

"Is that an admission of guilt I hear?" He couldn't help himself, trying to drag it out as long as possible. He didn't want to tell her, to have to remember himself what he had helped make happen. He had held onto the vague thoughts about buying Caffrey himself before they told him he had already been sold. "Should I be looking into you?"

"Please, I'm sure you arrest innocent people every day. Like Neal for instance."

He leveled her with an aggravated scowl. "I know the two of you have pulled cons _together_ , aside from whatever you've pulled on your own. You're not going to convince me that you're some naïve little girlfriend who had no idea what was going on. Now get out of here before I find something to arrest you for."

Her eyes narrowed poisonously. "Not until you tell me where Neal is."

o0O0o

Kate stumbled out of the Bureau offices in shock. She wove her way through the planters of leafless trees lining the sidewalks alongside the podlines, trying to swallow down the bile attempting to crawl its way out of her throat. She pulled the memglass out of her pocket, opened it up, and punched in every number she had for Mozzie. "Hey," she said when he answered. "Don't hang up, I need your help. Can you hack into the slave registry database?"

o0O0o

The third day he was in the bathroom was when it all started to wash over him. The white tile walls blurred, the grout mingling with the tile, mingling with the white ceiling paint, mingling with the white porcelain bathtub and white porcelain sink, and white tile counter top, and white faucets, and white trash can, and white takeout bag, and white unwashed plate and mug. There was a brown ring around the inside of the coffee mug. He stared at it for a while before he stood up and washed it out in the sink.

o0O0o

Her hand emerged from the open door and set a new takeout bag on the counter. There was a gyro inside.

o0O0o

He dug his heels in and tried to talk to her when she shoved him out the door, but she just stayed silent and pushed harder.

o0O0o

There was a narrow band of carpeting near the sink, and at night, he rolled under the doors to the built in cabinets and slept on the softest part of the floor he could find.

o0O0o

The next morning, the same hand that shoved his breakfast into the room, more toast and a glass of apple juice, tossed in a tee shirt and brown slacks. He unrolled them. Stitched on both in big red letters were the words "Property of Sara Ellis." He balled them up and threw them in the trash with the takeout bags.

o0O0o

That evening, when she came in to take her shower, she pulled them out of the trash and folded them on the counter.

o0O0o

He threw them away again as soon as the door was closed, making sure to spill the ranch that went with the chicken salad she had got him all over them, and she took them away that evening when she saw them. But the next morning, she left them clean and folded on the counter instead of giving him breakfast.

o0O0o

Neal tried for hours to ignore them, sitting there, color in the colorless room, before shoving them into the cabinet under the sink.

o0O0o

She came in to use the bathroom, and Neal flinched away before she could shove him out the door, and leave him stiff, trapped, and paralyzed on the floor outside the bathroom. He smelled so bad that he couldn't close his mouth and breathe at the same time. He thought he was supposed to get used to that, but... Maybe he was just imagining it, alone in the featureless, cold white room. "How long have I been in here?"

She didn't answer. She wrinkled her nose as she moved towards him, and he darted back again, sick with himself, falling to his knees.

"Here goes nothing," he muttered under his breath, and she glanced down at him suspiciously. "Mistress."

"You know you're going to have to keep calling me that, right?" she said, stepping close, so that the bottom of her jacket brushed across his face. "If you stop you go right back in here."

He nodded, hoping to avoid saying the word again, at least once, but she kept watching him until he opened his mouth. "Yes, Mistress."

She grabbed his collar. It jerked against his throat, cutting off his air as her fingers ghosted over the glass in an arcane dance, widening the territory he could roam. He could see the light the collar gave off as she programmed instructions into it reflected on the walls, and flickering just out of sight under his eyes, but he couldn't see what her fingers were doing, and even if it weren't reading her fingerprints with every touch, he realized, exhausted, that there would have been no way for him to wrest control of it from her, even if she were gone. "Go on, get out of here," she ordered him. "I'll turn the taps back on. When I'm done in here, take a shower. You smell like shit."

o0O0o

When Neal stepped out of the shower, his clothes were gone, and the ones he had hidden under the sink were spread out on the counter for him. He held in his grimace of distaste and put them on.

o0O0o

She put his dinner on the floor next to the kitchen table.

"You expect me to eat on the floor?" He folded his arms, but she just stood there impassively. "Mistress."

"What do you think?" she asked, walking back into the living room.

"How long was I in there?" he called after her.

She turned her head back to him as she kept walking. "Three weeks."

Holding in a shiver, he sat down on the floor.


	2. Chapter 2

00316618525

Part II

"It explains a lot." Kate had her back to him, setting her ancient electric oven's preheat function.

"Stop saying that," Mozzie hissed back. "It doesn't explain anything."

"I just mean about the way he never wanted to tell me his real name, Moz, you don't have to be so..." She turned the Oung Suon she had just forged towards the light and examined it carefully, and he resisted the urge to take it from her, to check that the paint was dry enough to age right. "He knew mine."

"We knew yours because we met you before you got into the game," Mozzie told her slowly, like he couldn't believe how stupid she could be sometime, feeling sick. "I always thought it was just the one thing he had appropriate paranoia about. I guess I was wrong."

She opened the oven door and put the painting inside. "You know what? You're the wrong person to talk to."

Mozzie folded his arms sourly, and mocked her the second he thought she wasn't looking.

She narrowed her eyes, but let it pass. "So did you manage to find him yet?"

"I told you, I don't have the expertise to hack into any of the big government databases!" he yelped at her shrilly. "I've been asking around, but I haven't found anybody I trust enough to tell them what's going on who's willing to help!"

"Well you're going to have to trust someone, because it's been more than a month, and you remember what Burke said the average life expectancy was on one of those ozone building crews?"

"Six months, I know already!"

Her hands balled into fists. "That's right, six months, and let's be honest, it's Neal we're talking about here, and..." She let it hang.

"Hey, he's tougher than you think." he was trying to reassure himself as much as he was trying to reassure her, and he just knew she could tell, and it wasn't going to work on either of them.

"Come on Moz," she laughed, miserably, and sat down. "Just find him for me, okay?"

And he had a sudden, sharp, painful feeling of deja vu, of Neal pressuring him to find Kate. "Why are _you_ so worked up?" he almost screamed. "Huh? You take off, and we don't ever hear from you, and you suddenly are about Neal _after_ you get him dragged off to wherever-"

"I'm sorry!" she yelled. "Alright? I'm sorry!" She shot him a painful, resentful look, and he wondered angrily if she was about to start crying, and what he should do about it. "Just because I didn't see him doesn't mean I wanted him hauled off and sold."

"Well," he spat. "I'm so glad your guilt is such a good motivator."

"Just go," she said thickly. "I have a painting to finish."

"I don't know why you even bothered with that thing," he snipped, unable to help himself. "You never get enough for late twenty-first century art to make it worthwhile."

"Yeah, and it also doesn't attract a lot of attention of the law enforcement variety." She glanced back at the oven. The last thing they needed right then was attention.

o0O0o

The bathroom still smelled like unwashed man and stale food; besides which, venturing inside left him feeling boxed in, like his skin was going to crawl off his body. Neal avoided it, his eyes sliding away from the door when they landed on it, and when he had to go in, he closed his eyes against the white.

For the first few days, Neal just let himself breathe. He wandered around he house aimlessly, or combed Sara's collection of paper books. He rifled through drawers without purpose, picked through her closet, and idly flipped over the couch cushions until his heartbeat stopped thundering in his ears and he stopped straining for the sound, any sound, of another human voice, until he became bored.

When she came home in the evenings, and before she left for work, he told himself it was just another kind of con and smiled at her obsequiously and called her "Mistress" until she wanted to scream. "I think I figured it out, Caffrey." Her voice dripped with the tight, false cheerfulness she adopted whenever she saw him.

"I thought I didn't have a name," he fired back, without looking up from the book he had pilfered from her study.

"That's true," she said, inclining her head. "You know, I can't keep calling you zero zero three one whatever. I'll have to come up with something. Anyway, I figure that you're a conman. You know when you've got it made."

"Don't you have to go to work?"

She smiled widely and pulled the book out of his hands. "I can afford to be late. Anyway, I'm sure you've considered the fact that you're well fed here, it's warm you have a nice place to sleep, and you don't have to work for it."

He eyed her, masking his nervousness behind dull, obvious anger. "I don't think you really believe I want to be here."

"Doesn't matter what I believe. It matters what I'm going to do about it." She paced in front of the couch he was lying on, and stopped for a moment to throw his feet off before going back to pacing. "I could stick you back in the bathroom, but then I would have to clean up after you and I don't want that."

"You could always let me go." He twisted his lips up.

She threw his feet off the couch again and sat down where they had been. "Keep trying. That argument won't get you anywhere."

"So what are you going to do about my life of leisure?" She shot him a warning look, and he grinned a challenge. "Mistress."

"You're my slave," she smirked. "I'm putting you to work."

She stood up, waved him good bye, and locked the door behind her, leaving him to ponder that menacing proclamation. Neal stood up and hunted through the book he had stolen for his place. Holding it open with one finger, he made his way into the study and pulled open a junk drawer for something to use as a bookmark. His hand fell on an old fashioned permanent marker. A wonderful, horrible idea struck him, and when he found a pack of graphite pencils, that idea became a plan. He scooped them up and put them in his front pant pocket. She did say that if he found anything in the study, he could use it. He remembered that very clearly.

o0O0o

On her bookcase in the study, along with the fancy, bound novels, were a set of glossy, expensive art history books, with prints of important paintings by important artists. Neal flipped the book open to a certain painting by Raphael.

o0O0o

The door opened, and Sara looked around at living room walls. "Cute."

Neal turned to her from the wall with his carefully laid pencil grid and heavy black outlines of Saint George and the dragon. "Aww, you think I'm cute!"

"Like a five-year-old."

He capped the marker and waved at his work. "What do you think? I gave you the Raphael."

Her expression hardened, and then she bared her teeth. "I think there's a bathroom just waiting for you to go back to living in it again."

He swung himself around on the footstool he had found in the closet earlier and perched on it, his feet dangling to the ground. "I think you don't want to do that, Sara, because I've been thinking a lot about how to entertain myself if you stick me back in there, and I think I'd teach myself to sing. Now, I'm really bad at singing. I sing very off key, but I would have a lot of time to practice. And there's plenty of stuff in there that I can make instruments out of."

"What's your point?"

He smiled at her. "I can annoy you so much worse than you can annoy me."

"I don't think you have any idea how unpleasant I can make things for you," she snapped. "But you know what, I don't have to worry about your wall art, because I don't have to clean it up."

"Aww, you're going to have the most interesting wall in New York, why would you talk about cleaning it up?"

She put her purse down on the table, and Neal noticed she only had one takeout bag. "I'm not. If you want it cleaned up, or painted over, or finished, or whatever, you're the one who has to do it. I don't care."

"It's your apartment," he reminded her.

Se gave him an enigmatic smile. "I fired my cleaning service."

"What?"

"I have a slave," she answered. "Why should I pay someone else so that his slaves can clean my apartment instead?"

"Because I have no interest in cleaning your apartment, and you can't make me?" he shot back, going back to his mural.

"Great, then no one will clean the apartment." She unpacked her dinner and took a bite out of her gyro. "I can live with that. But can you live without eating? Because I'm not picking up food for you anymore. You want something to eat, you have to cook it. Or eat it raw, I guess."

Neal kicked his feet in the air. "What if I can't cook?"

She snorted. "I've seen surveillance video of you cooking."

"Great, I love to cook," Neal tried. "Thank you so much for giving me free reign over the kitchen."

"And you're going to cook for me, or you don't eat anything."

He glanced at her gyro. "You already bought yourself dinner."

"Then I guess you won't eat tonight." She took another bite and swallowed. "I'll wake you up for breakfast."

o0O0o

The next morning, he popped toast into the toaster, poured them both cups of coffee, dug the jelly out of the refrigerator, and planned his next move. "I'm not going to be able to cook much," he told her, seething. "Your refrigerator isn't exactly full of food."

"Taken care of," she said as if she barely noticed him. "I ordered more last night. They'll be dropping it off this evening."

"That's nice." He drank the milk mock absently, intent on her. "So do you actually know what to buy? I mean if you never cook yourself..."

"I guess you're just going to have to find out." She had her memglass open and was scrolling through the news, eyes on it instead of him. Until she looked up, and Neal found that he suddenly wasn't ready for all that focus to be turned on him, all that certainty that in the end, she was going to win, and he was going to be lucky to get out of there with the clothes he had been captured in. "By the way, you called me by my name last night."

He gulped down his coffee. "What's your point?"

"I told you what was going to happen if you didn't call me 'Mistress', didn't I?"

Neal tensed and backed up in his chair. "And I told you how I was going to keep myself busy if you stuck me back-"

"Shut up." She reached across the table and grabbed his collar.

Neal's hand closed around her wrist. He pried her hand away and held on until she yanked it out of his grasp. Snarling, she jerked her baton out of her purse, and cracked it across the top of his shoulder. Neal fell out of his chair with a thumb. "Ow!" he yelped, surprised.

She jumped down from her chair and brought down the baton across his shoulders and pushed her weight into it to hold him down as he tried to wriggle away. She grabbed his collar again, and one handed, she entered the instructions into it to to confine him to the bathroom. "You're lucky," she panted, letting him up. "I could just delete the map entirely and leave you frozen here in the middle of the floor."

"Yeah, you're so generous," he retorted, staggering to his feet and sprinting to the bathroom before the chip could freeze him in place in the middle of the floor as she had suggested.

As soon as he had crossed the threshold, he opened his mouth to start to sing. She shut the door. "Don't bother. I'm going to work."

He opened the door so that at least he had something other too look at than the plain white walls, and as she moved to the apartment's front door, he lay down and hung his head out of the bathroom door, careful to keep the chip in his back behind the invisible line over the door. She just sighed and left the apartment.

Neal crossed his feet and hummed, letting one foot bob with the beat, planning just what he was going to do when she got home. He closed his eyes.

Then the music started, high pitched, obnoxiously loud children's voices meandering their way up and down the scales, singing about addition and subtraction and the joy of math. And when it was over, there were only a few seconds of silence before it started again at the beginning.

Neal tried to throw open the drawers and the cabinets, to search frantically for cotton balls, or anything else to block the sound out of his ears, but they wouldn't open. He bit back a groan. She had programmed them closed.

The horrible, catchy, educational children's song poured in from the speakers in the walls all over the apartment, turned up so loud he spared a hope that one of the neighbors might call the police to get them to turn off the noise.

But none of them did. High-priced little apartments like Sara's were soundproof. Neal hunched in on himself and covered his ears, burying his head in his arms.

o0O0o

Sara left the music on when she came home. She stood over him where he lay in the bathroom doorway, hands over his ears.

"Alright," he tried not to shout. "You win, Mistress, just turn it off!"

She pulled out her memglass and switched the music off. The silence echoed strangely around him until she knelt down to program his collar and asked, "Which one of us is more annoying again?"

Neal didn't answer. He followed her out into the living room and sat down at the table warily. She ignored him.

When the doorbell rang a half an hour later, Neal jolted so badly he almost fell over.

"That's the groceries," Sara said brightly.

o0O0o

Neal stacked the dirty dishes on the counter. "I'm not going to wash these."

Sara looked up from where she was setting the refrigerator to open only when she touched it. "What?"

"You said nothing was going to get clean unless I cleaned it," he reminded her. "I'm not."

"Okay."

"You're not going to fight about this?" Neal questioned, feeling the wind leave his sails.

She stepped back. "I told you before, I can live with that."

"Really?" Neal said, widening his grin. "Because you strike me as a very tidy person."

"I am," she confirmed. "But I'm also very stubborn, which is also why I'm going to get that Raphael."

"What if I don't give you the Raphael, _because I don't have it?"_ He let his frustration show.

"Funny how you knew which Raphael I was talking about so you could start drawing it on my wall."

He sighed. "Everybody was talking about it in the circles I like to run with." It wasn't even a lie. He had liked to talk about it a lot.

"Yeah, I heard the rumors," she told him seriously.

o0O0o

They were running out of dishes, which sat on the counter, growing a stinking layer of scum. Sara's shoes lay stacked in front of the door. Her suits, skirts, and dresses lay strewn throughout the apartment, along with a never ending supply of the shirts and slacks with "property of Sara Ellis" written on them. There were bags of trash tied and waiting in the corner of the kitchen and Neal was starting to feel the oppressive crush of it all. He shoved a pile of laundry off the couch and flopped down. "So what are you going to do when we run out of clothes?"

She stood in her bedroom doorway, warily glancing at the heaps of clutter. "You get to wear dirty clothes."

Neal hid a grimace. "I bet your bosses will love it when you go to work like that."

 _"You_ wear dirty clothes," she said again. "I get to go shopping. I'm going to get a lot of money very soon."

Neal scowled and pulled his feet up onto the couch, propping them up on the armrest. "Spending that Raphael commission before you even have it? Isn't there a saying about counting chickens?"

"If I don't get the painting, I get really cheap labor." She stayed in her bedroom door and leaned against the frame, arms folded. "I win either way."

"You don't have that yet either," he reminded her, irritably.

o0O0o

Sara still had half a closet full of clothes when Neal first had to pick a dirty pair of pants and shirt off the ground. He let the shirt fall over his head with a shudder.

"How did you manage to survive before you escaped?" she tried to hide an unkind laugh, and tried harder to hide a flash of real curiosity. Neal caught both. She could see the flicker in his eyes.

"Who says I escaped?" He tugged the shirt into place, keeping his body relaxed as she watched him dress, so that she wouldn't guess how much it bothered him. "Maybe I convinced the overseer to just let me walk out the front door."

"Stop being a smartass, Caffrey," she ordered. "That's still an escape."

Neal inclined his head, gratified.

But Sara continued. "I bet the poor sap got reamed out by his bosses, probably even fired for your little escape."

Neal snorted. "If you expect me to care..."

"No, I guess, not, but I do." Sara knew she should be leaving, she was going to be late, but she couldn't stop herself, couldn't squelch her need to know about him, this man she hadn't even thought about except as a target before she brought him into her home. He was a stranger, a thief, a liar, and she knew all that, but she hadn't hesitated about dragging him into the place she slept, ate, and lived, and keeping him there, because of the simple fact that he was a slave, not a person, and therefore not really a stranger. She pondered the way they were blundering through what it meant when mistress and slave lived in the same apartment, ate the same food, and could reach out and touch each other.

Because ordinary people didn't own slaves. Slaves belonged to large corporations, or the Global Federation government, or sometimes to the very very rich who didn't want to hire a company to clean for them and see inside their home, or buy food at a restaurant every time they wanted to eat, the kind of people who owned their own palatial plantation mansions in the countryside outside the world's city towers, their farmland and slave barracks splayed out around them like a blanket over the world. Slaves weren't owned by people like her.

Neal's head tilted up under her moral rebuke, the idea that he should have thought about his poor overseer before he made a break for it, eyes narrowed down, "If he were holding _you_ captive, you wouldn't have cared either."

She walked around behind him to the door, her purse swinging, her shoulder brushing against his back. "But the thing is, you're supposed to be kept captive, Caffrey, that's the point."

o0O0o

Kate stood over Mozzie's shoulder, his face almost touching the memglass to hide the surface from her, or, she supposed, from anyone else trying to look over her shoulder. She had no idea with him anymore what was meant to annoy her, and what was just his usual paranoia. "Found anything yet?"

Mozzie pointed to a column of slave identification numbers. "These are all the slaves Aris bought in November."

"That's the company that got the contract from the government for the atmospheric ozone reconstruction project," Kate said quickly, before he could tell her that again in that oh-so-patient-Kate-is-an-idiot voice he had been using with her since Neal had been arrested.

"Very good Kate!" he got in anyway. He pointed to eight more columns. "And these are the slaves sold by the New York auction houses in November. And you don't want to know what I had to go through to get these."

"You're a wonder, Moz, you really are." She patted his shoulder. "So you cross referenced the lists?"

He pointed to a tenth, much shorter list. Seventy-three numbers winked balefully up at her from the surface of Mozzie's cracked and salvaged memglass.

"So we just have to get pictures to these numbers." Kate sat down on the table. She saw Mozzie's mouth twist and his shoulders hunch inward. "You didn't find a way to get into the database, did you?"

"But wait there's more!" he burst out, with the false exuberance of the desperately unhappy. "These are the slaves sold to the diamond mines, and these are the ones sold to the nuclear waste disposal crews, and these are the ones sold to-"

"I get it." Each column he pointed to had another towering stack of identification numbers. "Do you still have that little cloning cube?"

"Why?" he questioned dubiously.

"I think you and I need to buy a slave.

o0O0o

"Where did you get that coat?" Mozzie demanded, trying to keep his voice low.

Kate restrained herself from rubbing her face with the palm of her hand in annoyance, which would have smeared her makeup. "I took it, look, it's clean I found the security strip."

"If you get us caught," he whispered nastily and pushed the cloning cube up high in his pocket so that she could see it peaking out. "This baby is going to get both of us sent to prison for the rest of our lives!"

"Stop fussing," she said, barely moving her mouth. "Which one of us is the one who actually cons people for a living? Just concentrate on not screwing this up yourself."

The pod rumbled along its cable, down between the city levels until it pulled to a stop on the platform outside the cluster of auction houses that handled new York's slave trade. Kate draped the extremely expensive coat she had stolen over the shoulders of the extremely expensive dress Neal bought her when she still thought he was a financial wizard and future executive, and stepped out of the pod before Mozzie could try to stop her.

He trotted along beside her, trying to step in front and cut her off, but she didn't stop until she stood in front of the door to Bay Auction House. Mozzie opened the door.

"We have to open our own doors now?" she griped, her shoes clicking on the metal floor. "What's the world coming to?"

"I told you, this isn't the way people do things." He finally got ahead of him, and while he was busy ranting at her, she straightened his bow tie. "Nobody actually goes down to the auction houses except the underlings of underlings. They don't have people waiting to open doors for people like that, Pet."

"Don't be that way, Darling," she chided I'm sure there are plenty of people who prefer to take a more hands on approach to these kinds of things."

The desk clerk tried hard to wipe the look of pained astonishment off his face. "Can I help you?"

Sweeping her head back, Kate kept up her quick clip forward until she reached the reception desk and put her hands on it. She leaned in. "My husband and I-"

"My wife and I are looking to buy a few new domestic slaves," Mozzie cut in forcefully. "Pet, we should have just called _in_ , they could have come down to the house, shown us a catalogue-"

"But I want to get a _feel_ for these slaves," she told him with just a little petulance and a small flash of calculated, lascivious cunning. "A picture just isn't good enough. I want to see them."

The man at the desk wasn't at all practiced in hiding his expressions, and his mouth hung open just a little bit. Ma'am, we don't-"

"Look," she started threateningly. "We came all the way into the city just for this-"

"Please don't lie like that, to people, Pet!" Mozzie broke in. "You know I came for a meeting with the board."

"Okay, _I_ came all the way into the city just for this." She could see the cogs spinning around in the brain of that man behind the desk, trying to assess her, trying to figure out what to do about the ugly rich man's, gorgeous, spoiled, obnoxious wife looking for a few good looking slaves to screw, and her besotted husband, either too stupid to see, or unable to stop her, obviously too important to insult by throwing them out, but unpleasable if he let them stay. She went in for the kill. "And I'm not used to coming away empty handed."

He grimaced and turned to Mozzie, as if hoping he would help him. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Mozzie cross his arms and scowl. _Don't over play it,_ she wanted so badly to tell him.

"We're not really set up to receive customers, of- of your caliber here, ma'am..." he tried.

Kate glanced around at the bare, industrial concrete floor and muddy gray walls and sniffed. "That's obvious."

"I'm so sorry." He didn't sound sorry, just nervous.

"But you do hold the slaves here, don't you?"

"Some of them," he said awkwardly. "Wh-why don't I open up the catalogue of our current stock for you on the memglass, and you can browse while I bring my manager down here to speak with you?"

Kate looked back at Mozzie and sighed. "I guess that'll have to do."

His fingers hopped around on the memglass, pulling it open and typing in a passcode. When the screen cleared, he stood up and pulled out his chair for her. "I'll be right back."

As soon as the door had closed behind him, Mozzie giggled. "Don't hurry on our account."

"Shh." Kate poured over the memglass, until she found the sales records and held out her hand to Mozzie for the cloning cube. He passed it to her, and she held it over the memglass. Five seconds later, it beeped softly, and she turned it off before handing it back to Mozzie. She pulled the catalogue back up and pretended to peruse the merchandise. With a sick kind of realization, she wondered how many of the men and woman, unkempt and unconscious in the photographs were as smart and as capable as Neal, or as she was.

It was harder than she expected it to be to smile, however frostily at the desk clerk when he returned with his boss. "I'm afraid we won't be needing your services, gentlemen," she said, picking up her purse with false dignity. "Nothing in your stock sparked my interest."

o0O0o

"You think any of those auction house receptionists ever go out for drinks and compare notes?" Kate asked softly as they waited for the pod to arrive.

"Oh God, you're going to spend the next hour imagining the sordid love lives of the white collar poor." They walked into the pod with Mozzie's arm around her waist, and he waited for the doors to hum closed before he let it drop. "I thought for certain somebody was going to notice your scuffed heels."

Kate crossed her legs. "Well if you hadn't made us go running all over the city doubling back on podlines, they wouldn't be scuffed, now would they?"

Mozzie glowered at her.

"Your paranoia really gets on my nerves sometimes," she said offhandedly as he pulled the cloning cube out. "I really don't think the FBI has got it through their heads yet that the two of us can pull off jobs without Neal there to hold our hands. No one's following us. You would've noticed."

"Of course you'd think-"

"Look, I'm sorry Neal got caught. I'm sorry the FBI used me as bait, and I want him back too. But you don't have to treat me like an idiot because you miss your friend."

Mozzie didn't answer. He pressed a button on his cloning cube and reversed its setting. It streamed the accumulated sales data into his memglass, where he could filter it by date and they could see the pictures of the slaves.

"So," Kate began, breaking the sullen silence. "Have you and Neal ever pulled that trick? While I was, um... gone? I bet he made a great spoiled spouse."

Mozzie kept his eyes on the screen. "The best."

o0O0o

The trash bags sat piled together on the thin band of concrete that made up Sara Ellis's sidewalk. The laundry was stuffed into bags and set in a hamper, ready for pick up. The dishes had been cleaned and stacked back in the cabinets. Neal had swept and mopped the floors, scrubbed the bathroom until it stopped smelling, tidied until he stopped feeling like he was going to go crazy in her apartment. And there he was, sitting in the doorway of her apartment, as close to the outside as the collar and chip would let him go.

o0O0o

When she came home, she looked at the trash, and the laundry, and the clean apartment, and smiled at him instead of telling him, "I told you so."

o0O0o

The trash pod trundled between the landings and small strips of sidewalks and grass filled planters. Barb hopped off to grab the bags in front of the apartments, and hopped back on, over and over again.

One of the doors opened, and she expected another trash bag. Instead, a man with a memory glass collar and nice hair slid sideways to stand in the doorway and prop the door open with one arm. "Do you have a minute? I'd like a word with you."

"What?"

He gave her a bright smile, and he looked like a free man, with his good teeth, and his nice, clean, soft skin and hair. "I'm Neal, what's your name?" He gave his name like a free man, too.

It occurred do her that he might actually be a free man. Some people liked to do that, she'd heard, play games like that, and apartments in the city didn't have slaves in them. "I am Zero, Zero Two-"

He waved his hand to cut her off. "I don't want your number."

Barb glanced back at the pod, with the timer that told her how long she had before it would leave her and the chip in her back would freeze her in place for the overseer to tack down hours from now, and whip the skin off her back. The light was still green. "The overseers call me Button."

"And what do the other slaves call you?" he asked, then shook his head. "What do you want me to call you?"

"I don't want you to call me anything." She frowned at him. "I have to go."

He grabbed her hand. As she yanked it away, he grabbed the other one. "I bet you were a cute kid. How old are you, twelve?"

"Thirteen." She pulled hard on her arm, trying to free it, a shudder wracking her body. "Let me go."

"Your skin's broken out right now, but give it a few years for that to clear up, and you'll be a really pretty girl. I bet you're not looking forward to that at all. You got sisters that happened to? Brothers? Is your mother or father there with you? Maybe you're really lucky and your grandparents are with you too. They must be getting up there. How long do you think they're going to be able to keep working?" The man was shivering in his tee-shirt and light pants, but he didn't seem to notice. "How long do you think it's going to be before they drag them out and put a laser bolt between their eyes because it's cheaper than feeding them? I can make it so that you never have to worry about any of that again. I can free you, and anybody else you want to bring with you."

Barb stepped on his foot and ripped her hand away, backing up hurriedly. "You're crazy."

Grimacing, the man wiped the hand that had touched her smudged and dirty skin on his pants. "I was free for more than ten years before they managed to catch me. I can get you IDs, documents, I can teach you to read and write, how to act like a free person, all of that, but I need you to help me get the chips out."

"Ten years?" she whispered.

"More." He was shivering in earnest by then, and he folded his arms across his chest for warmth. "I was sixteen when I escaped."

The light on the trash pod turned yellow. "I gotta go," she said softly. glancing back at it.

"Okay." He let his hands fall to his sides. "Meet me back here next week. I'll tell you what to do."

"Okay." Her lips were cracked, and she licked them nervously. "I'm Barbra, by the way."

He smiled as she shuffled away with the trash bags. "See you, Barbra."

o0O0o

"You realize I have veto power over this list, right?" Sara told him, entering the grocery list he had written on the old fashioned whiteboard she had found for him, with the same marker he had used to sketch out the rough beginnings of the stolen Raphael she wanted so badly. "So you don't get to eat me out of house and home."

"Oh come on, I'm just trying to make the poor guys' trip down here worthwhile." Neal leaned back against the counter top, hands behind. "You know they probably have to haul themselves all the way up to this level just for you. You know they mostly deal with restaurants, right?"

She didn't even bother replying. "No caviar. Only a dozen eggs, no wines that cost more than you did, lose half the cheese at least, and no trying to cost me so much that I let you get out of cooking!"

"Aww." He showed his teeth. "You're not even mentioning the milk."

She stared at him, hard. "I've always bought milk. I can afford to buy it for you too."

"Maybe I should have put down _eight_ liters." Milk and cheese, like eggs, were an extravagance, something that unlike meat, couldn't be grown in a vat, that still had to involve actual animals. Milk and eggs put a dent in the budget of even someone as comfortably well off as Sara, who could live in one of the apartments that still had a kitchen, that only a few decades ago had held people who really could afford to have slaves that weren't dirt cheap escapees, before such people had fled the city towers, choosing space and privacy over convenience, to build themselves palaces in the empty swaths of land that had once been America. "What makes you think I'm trying to get out of cooking?" he asked, trying not to laugh and let loose the bleakness. "Instead of this?" He waved his hands around. "All of it."

"That's your grand plan?" she eyed the floor and shook her head. "You're going to be so expensive, that after a certain point, I let you go because you've cost me more than I would ever get from recovering the Raphael?"

Neal gave a disgusted huff.

"I control the money, Zero Zero Three One whatever, Neal." She waited for him to blink. "Besides, even if you got me to that point, I still would have more to gain by getting the Raphael."

Neal gave her a brittle smile. "There's a logical fallacy in there somewhere."

"Hmm. Have fun untangling it." She leaned back against the wall, mirroring his posture. "In the meantime, why don't you just give the Raphael to me? You've given in on everything else. We already know I'm more stubborn than you. Just give in, and give me what I want, and you can go free."

"You know, even if I had the Raphael, I wouldn't be able to get it for you with this chip in my back anyway," Neal snapped, hands clenched on the counter.

"That's why you're supposed to tell me where it is," Sara said slowly. "So I can go get it."

o0O0o

Later that evening, the question Neal had been holding onto since their earlier conversation came bubbling to the surface. "You trust me not to send you into a trap? Tell you I knew where the Raphael was and then..."

She took another bite of the meal he had made for her, lamb and couscous, and plenty of spice to hide any poison he could get his hands on. "I trust myself to get out of it." And Neal, who had a lot of experience in the matter, could tell she wasn't telling him the whole truth. And he wasn't sure if it was important, if he was supposed to care.

o0O0o

Neal adjusted the stepping stool and climbed back onto it. Uncapping the pen, he drew across his pencil sketches on the wall, filling in the lines of Sara's stolen Raphael, growing the mural up and out. He would have killed for paint, but it didn't matter. When he finally managed to escape, Sara would probably have it painted it over anyway.

The door opened, but Neal didn't stop. He pressed a button on the foot stool, making it rise higher until he could reach the wall where it touched the ceiling.

"You going to do the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling next?"

"I'm saving that for the bedroom," he answered her. "Just think, you could wake up every morning to the fall of Adam and Eve and God throwing them out of the Garden."

"Just be sure you have dinner cooked first," she reminded him, unenthused.

"Yes, I've noticed a little problem with our system," Neal told her, voice laden with sarcasm as he capped the marker and stepped down from the stool.. "How can I ever have dinner on the table hot and ready for you if I can't even open the refrigerator?"

"Gotta be here to make sure you don't steal anything."

"You sure it's not so you can keep an eye on me so I don't slip a little bug spray into your meal?"

"I don't think you'd murder me," she kept her eye on him as he walked into the kitchen. "Real ringing endorsement of your character."

"Especially since you don't trust me not to steal food."

"Well, you _are_ a thief." She pressed the refrigerator door and let it swing open. "That's why you're here."

Neal narrowed his eyes, but his voice was light. "True, if I were just an escaped slave, I'd have been sold to one of those nuclear cleanup crews or something. I'd probably be dead by now."

"If you were just an escaped slave, the FBI wouldn't have been after you," she shot back, leaning in close to him.

"Yeah, I would have done great," he sighed. "No money, no skills, no ID. What else was I supposed to do?"

 _Not escape in the first place,_ she wanted to say. It was on the tip of her tongue. "You're trying to tell me theft and forgery didn't take skill? you learned that. You should have learned something else."

Neal snorted.

"Maybe if your ancestors hadn't been thieves, you wouldn't have been a slave to begin with," she continued snidely.

"How do you know it was theft?" he challenged. "There were a lot of ways to become a slave. They needed cheap workers so badly back then. For all I know, my ancestors were all abandoned in dumpsters as babies."

"Which would mean that your ancestors just before them had left their children to die in dumpsters," she reminded him coldly, seating herself at the table as he arranged pots, pans, and ingredients.

He looked up and turned back to her. "That's exactly the logic the pro-slavery lobby used. I read a lot about it after I got out. Those babies carry the same dirty, wrong, sick genes as their parents. If we have to rescue them, might as well make them slaves. Get them and their kids out of society forever. And all the criminals, and drug addicts, and people who can't fend for themselves."

Sara nodded. It wasn't like he was telling her anything she didn't already know. There was a reason some people were slaves and some weren't.

"They thought back then that there wasn't going to be any more crime or poverty, after slavery." He started putting everything back into the refrigerator. "Look at how that worked out."

"Aren't you going to make dinner?" she demanded.

"Not hungry. Get it yourself."

o0O0o

"How can he not be in here?" Mozzie cried, holding the memglass up and gesticulating with it wildly. "We went to every auction house in the city!"

Kate jerked her gaze away from the snow falling outside the window. "But they had to sell him through one of the auction houses! How else would they have sold him?"

"You think maybe your government stooge friend lied to you?" he accused, and Kate decided to refrain from pointing out that he wasn't her friend.

"The government could have decided he was useful and bought him for themselves."

"Or he never was a slave, and that was just something he said to get you to stop looking into it."

Kate wanted to scream. "If this theory of yours ends with secret government prisons, stop right now. I don't want to hear it."

Mozzie paced back and forth. "You're afraid to listen because it might be true."

"I think we really _are_ going to have to find someone to crack the slave database," she said despondently, instead of replying. "Or we could try breaking into Burke's office to see if he has Neal's ID number.

"Or we could just ask Burke." Mozzie's words were high and panicky.

o0O0o

He had on a woman's peacock blue coat when he opened the door, and Barb fought to hold in a giggle. "Don't knock it," he told her. "It's warm."

Barb pinched her lips together and stifled her mirth. "So just because I'm here doesn't mean I'm going to help you. I have to come to get the trash."

"Yeah, but you're just standing here. And you haven't grabbed the trash yet." Neal leaned against the door, propping it open with one foot, as if he weren't afraid somebody would see what he was doing, plotting their escape.

"Okay." Trying to stop herself from shaking, Barb wished she could be that nonchalant about it. "It's just I need to get my brother out. He's the only one, but they've got him feeding the compactors, and that's how- There're accidents with it all the time with it, and I just- I got to get him out."

"It's okay." Neal put his clean hand on the shoulder of her dirty blue jumpsuit, but his fingers were tense and stiff, and any comfort he meant by it was lost. "Can you get him into the pod with you for a day?"

"I think so." She glanced back at the pod and the green light. "Maybe not right away, but... Yeah."

The fingers on her shoulder went limp with relief, and then dropped off her shoulder. Out of the woman's coat pocket, he pulled a bundle of carefully folded, clean, white paper napkins wrapped in plastic. Through the plastic, Barb could see the small, neat ink writing and pictures. "I need you to take this to a friend of mine. That's all I need you to do. Get your brother on the pod, and take this to a friend of mine, and he will get us what we need to remove those chips. Now I need you to tell me where you go on what days."

o0O0o

Kate pulled her coat collar up higher and shrugged down deeper into her scarf. The plane that had landed in front of her opened its doors, lowering plush, carpeted steps. She hadn't seen it until it was almost on top of her, it's camouflage and cloaking technology, the very best money could buy. Probably nobody but Kate, the pilot, and the man's bodyguards even knew the person stepping off the plane had left his opulent bolthole in South America. He waved to her as he descended. "Hello Kate!"

"Hello Vincent."

He looked at her face, chapped with cold, hands balled tightly in her sleeves. "My, you are as lovely as ever."

"Stop trying to charm me, Vincent, it won't work."

"Well you're the one who contacted me." He favored her with a smug, wolfish smile. "You must want something very badly."

"True you aren't easy to get a hold of," Kate told him thoughtfully as he came down to stand next to her. "The question is what do _you_ want? You came, didn't you?"

He looked her up and down, amused. "You said you had a problem only I could fix. How could you think I wouldn't come for you?"

She tried not to flinch away when he reached out to touch her. "It's about Neal."

"Oh yes." He put his hand on her shoulder. "I had heard you became quite the one woman crime spree since you left him. Don't tell me you went back to him."

Kate didn't react. "Neal's been arrested."

"And sold?" His smile changed, to falsely sympathetic, and even oilier than before.

She stepped back, letting his hand fall. "You knew?"

The relaxed way he he looked into her own horrified expression wasn't anything other than insulting, and she wanted him gone. She wanted to never have to think about him again. "I've known since just after he began working for me," he told her.

"Well, I need his ID number." She stared him down. "We need to find him."

"He just isn't good for you Kate." His hand was back on her shoulder in a flash. "I don't feel comfortable helping you with these self destructive impulses of yours."

"You could buy him," she cut in quickly. "Think about it. All of those skills, that great big brain of his, at your beck and call, just... Think about it."

"Really." His hand tightened around her shoulder, pressing in on her flesh underneath the layers of wool and synthetic fibers. "You wouldn't try to stop me?"

"I want him alive," she affirmed coldly. "I'll work on getting him away from you after I know he's safe."

"Once I have him, I'm not going to let him go." His smile showed a flash of teeth.

"I know."

He let his hand fall to his side, his eyes all too knowing for comfort. "As long as we understand each other.


	3. Chapter 3

00316618525

Part III

Sara's assistant was standing in her office, anxiously with a package under one arm, waiting for her when she arrived. "This showed up for you this morning, I'm sorry, I didn't see who brought it. It didn't come in with the rest of the mail. We already put it through all the scanners, but if you want somebody else to open it, just in case..."

"Thanks, Abigale," she said, dismissing her. "I'll take care of it."

Abigale fled. Sara sat down at her desk and carefully slit the packing tape with a pair of scissors. Inside was a Christmas tin. When she lifted the lid, a note was taped underneath. Ignoring the expensive cream candies inside, Sara read the handwritten note, with instructions to a small Greek restaurant a few podline stops away from her office, and a time. Who the hell even wrote handwritten notes anymore, she wondered. Only someone who didn't want to leave any trace would actually...

She ate lunch at that restaurant all the time. Checking to make sure her baton and her laser gun were in her purse where they belonged, she read the note again.

o0O0o

The restaurant was full of people when Sara arrived, and when she stepped out of the pod she had shared with a few people from the company whose names she had forgotten, she lingered in the restaurant doorway for just a moment before stepping into the line in front of the counter. As she scanned the crowd, then scanned it again, eyes flicking to anyone who might be a danger, the other patrons edged away from her nervously, but Sara didn't stop.

The table she chose had a view of the mirror against one wall, letting her see anyone behind her. She bit into her gyro, eyes glued to that mirror, tuning out the bland, poppy renditions of Christmas music, piped into the restaurant from speakers dotting the walls and ceiling.

But the woman who came to sit down with her passed in front of her, not behind. "Hello Ms. Ellis. My boss would like to make an offer for your slave."

Her suit fit her badly, and her graying blonde hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. She looked like she was used to wearing an exoskeleton and carrying a very big gun. Sara's expression hardened. "Who is your boss?"

"He wishes to remain anonymous," she said, unperturbed. "Which is why he sent me."

"He sent you to threaten me," Sara corrected impatiently. "You're a bodyguard, not a businesswoman."

"If I was going to threaten you, why would we have chosen such a public place for our meeting?" she asked calmly. "We thought it would ease your mind to meet somewhere familiar."

"Okay." Sara took another bite of her gyro and looked out over the woman's head. "You're here to intimidate me, not threaten. My mistake. Answer my question. Who is he, and what does he want with my slave?"

"Let's just say that in his previous line of work, your slave decided to relieve my boss of a lot of money. My boss would like to pay him back for his effort."

"He's not for sale." She wrapped up her gyro and stuffed it back in its bag, before standing up. "Excuse me."

"My boss knows about the Raphael he stole."

Sara stopped. "What about it?"

She folded her hands on top of the table. "He's willing to pay you double your commission to sell him the slave."

"He isn't for sale," Sara told her again, walking as quickly out of the restaurant as she could.

As soon as the pod door closed behind her, she straitened up in her seat, pretending to herself that her heart wasn't beating any faster than normal, collecting herself again for an afternoon at the office. She had phone calls to make.

o0O0o

When the doorbell rang, Neal almost toppled off the stepping stool. Cat-like, he caught himself and felt around under the stool for the button that would lower it down again. It hummed as it descended, and when it was low enough, he hopped off and padded his way over to the door.

He stopped, and took his hand off the door. The groceries had come yesterday, and nobody else had come to the apartment since Sara had bought him. Vaguely, that seemed a little sad to him, but he stood there, hand out in front of him, trying to figure out who would come to her apartment, in the middle of the day while she was at work.

"I know you're in there, Neal." Neal froze. His face froze. His arm froze, hanging in the air.

He knew that voice, even though he had never heard it say that name. He almost backed away from the door and ignored the man speaking, but if he did that, he didn't want to find out how Adler would respond. If he had flown to New York... He opened the door. "Adler."

"Hello Neal," Adler greeted him as if the last several years had never happened, and they were back in his office. "Though I suppose I might as well call you Nick; it's as much your name as anything else. Or James Bonds. That's what the FBI was calling you. Tell me, Neal, why did you, as a runaway slave, decide to pick a name that sounds the same as an act of submission?"

"It's what my mom called me," Neal asserted, almost, but not quite defiantly. "What are you doing here, Adler?"

"Aren't you going to invite me in?" he asked, instead of answering.

Neal braced himself in the doorway. "I don't think my mistress would appreciate having a fugitive in her home."

Adler gazed at Neal with a small, obnoxious smile. "What about you?"

"I'm not a fugitive anymore," Neal reminded him. "She won't get arrested for having me around. What are you doing here?"

"Kate asked me to come." He stayed on the stoop, friendly looking, and harmless, an inconspicuous man in an inconspicuous expensive suit, in a wealthy neighborhood. "She wants me to buy you. She promised me your good behavior. I'm here to see if she can deliver. I have to say, you certainly didn't give me the warmest welcome."

Neal's answering expression wasn't warm at all. He crossed his arms. "Last time I saw you, you walked away with all of my money."

"Fair's fair, Neal, you were trying to walk away with all of mine." He sidestepped Neal, slipping through the space left by Neal's crossed arms. Standing in Sara's living room, he looked like exactly what he had always pretended to be, and Neal, wrong-footed, found his mind drifting back to when he had worked for this man, and the brief time he had considered giving up the con, thinking maybe he could be like this man, and how he had tried to emulate him until in the end, Adler had conned _him._

It probably wasn't worth it to be angry at someone for something he did all the time. "You said Kate..."

"Asked me to buy you," Adler finished. "Yes. It's a shame, really. There she was, starting to get her life back on track, and you waltz back in, and then get yourself sold."

Neal put on a friendly, and obvious smile, furious all over again, suddenly terrified that Adler might be right, and he was dragging Kate along again, into something she hated. So he lied. "Really? Because I'd heard she had just really gotten going forging the Renascence Masters."

"Hmm." He inclined his head. "You both do your best work when you're separate. When you're together, it's like you just don't care."

"Probably." Neal wondered whether he should be worried about the implication that Adler had been keeping tabs on him, or not. "I'm sorry you came all this way for nothing, but I think I have a better shot getting away from Sara than I've got getting away from you."

"That's fine," Adler told him, unsurprised. "You should know though, Kate's been under the impression that you had been sold to one of the ozone building crews. Now I don't have any reason to tell her otherwise unless I take you home with me. I could always tell her that I couldn't find you... or that it was to late."

Neal's mouth went dry. "How is she?"

"Oh fine," he replied lightly. "Very worried about you, suffering under the delusion that she can get you away from me, but very worried about you. You should think about that."

Neal let his head bow. "Okay. I will."

"I'll come back in a few days for your answer."

Neal nodded.

o0O0o

After Adler left, Neal waited for Sara, frustrated and impotent. If he could just _talk_ to Kate, let her know he was okay... If he could, he would have been able to get her to break into Sterling Bosch and bring him the chip remover, and he would be gone already. If he had any way to get in touch with her that didn't involve leaving the house.

When the door opened, Neal was sitting against it, and he had to jump out of the way to let it open. It caught his foot and sent him sprawling. Sara peered down at him.

"I can't give you the Raphael because I don't have it. I sold it," he said. "But I can give you the fence."

"That's funny," said Sara pointedly. "Someone offered to buy you today, for twice my recovery fee. Your sudden openness have anything to do with this?"

"Wow, he works fast," Neal didn't bother to deny it. "When did you..."

"Lunch." She tapped her foot next to his head. "But I spoke with a woman."

Neal's throat went dry, his pulse loud in his own ears. "Did she have long, dark brown hair, blue eyes?"

"No," she told him. Neal should have anticipated just how disappointed he would feel. The thought that Adler might have lied to him about Kate nagged at him. "So you know who this is."

"He approached you before he..." Neal babbled distractedly. "That arrogant- wow."

"So you know who this is," Sara prompted again, irritably.

Neal nodded. "You aren't going to sell me to him, are you?"

"Give me a reason not to." She gave him her hand and helped him to his feet.

"I told you, I'll give you the fence," he wheedled. "But I need to talk to the FBI."

o0O0o

Mozzie rubbed his hand over his face, elbows on the table. "I can't believe you brought in Adler!"

"He found Neal, didn't he?" Kate held her hands up. "You were talking about bringing in the Mob, Moz! At least Adler isn't a killer."

"That we know of," Mozzie snapped. "Yet."

Kate let out a little puff of humorless laughter. "He's one of us, Moz. He's got money, and power. but in the end, he's just another con man. We can play him."

Mozzie didn't lift his head. "That's what you think."

o0O0o

He kept his head up and his shoulders back, and didn't allow the glass-walled walkways that he had last walked before waking up with a chip in his back and a collar around his neck, to cow him. Sara walked ahead of him. His clothing proclaimed her ownership of him. The collar sat heavy and tight around his throat. He had to fight himself not to duck his head, and shuffle his feet. He had to fight himself to look people in the eye, and smile at them like nothing had changed and he was as free as they were. Some of them stared him down, some dropped their eyes and avoided looking in his direction, but most just didn't seem to notice him, so inured were they to the presence of people who weren't there.

Neal wasn't. Neal had never been a slave in a city full of free people before, only a slave among other slaves.

Sara went into Peter's office and closed the door behind her. He watched through the glass, left to himself, surrounded by the other agents swirling around him. Slowly, the activity around him peeled his eyes away from Sara and Peter, and the conversation he couldn't hear. Standing in the middle of the bullpen, he caught the eyes of the agent who had put the cuffs on him months ago, Jones. The man looked away quickly, and when Neal caught his eyes again to give him a friendly smile, Jones flinched back. Jones had helped cause this, helped put the collar around his neck.

There was a sharp poke between his shoulder blades. He turned his head back with a scowl for the person who had jabbed him, but the woman just pointed to Peter's office, and Peter, who was waving him inside.

That was the secret to being seen, Neal knew. Peter noticed him, so the rest of them saw him. And if he let Adler buy him, he would never be invisible ever again.

He opened the door, and Sara shoved it closed behind him.

Peter gestured to him to sit down. "Sara tells me you can give me Vincent Adler."

"That's right," Neal replied through a challenging, cocky grin. "He's in town, trying to buy me."

Agent Burke got right to the point. "What do you want?"

Neal turned the grin off. Peter tensed and pulled back without leaving his chair. "You saying you're going to give it to me?" Neal asked. Peter just looked back. "Immunity. For my associates."

"You know, you _are_ a slave," Peter said conversationally. "You're supposed do do what your owner wants without trying to haggle, and I think Sara wants you to give me Adler."

Neal grinned again. "That's just the law. I've never been very good with the law."

Sara huffed, annoyed. "Neal and I have another arrangement anyway."

"So, your associates," Peter growled. "Would they include Kate?"

"Yes," Neal confirmed sharply. "And a friend of mine, whose name I won't give you. Look, I just don't want this to blow back on them."

"They have something to do with Adler?" Peter asked dryly.

Neal's expression didn't change. "Do you agree, or not?"

Peter put his elbows on his desk and rested his chin in his fists. "You want to give me Adler. It gets you something, something other than immunity for Kate and your friend, otherwise you wouldn't be here. I think I don't have to give you anything. You'll give me Adler anyway."

Neal's jaw clenched as his mask slipped for just a moment. "What I get isn't worth putting them in prison for, so yes, you do have to give them immunity, or I don't tell you anything." He could feel Sara watching him, considering, the thrill of having an audience again coursing through him.

"You said Adler's in town to buy you," Peter mused, eyes shining a little at Neal's nod. "Which means you don't need to tell me anything, and I don't need your permission to use you as bait."

Neal felt his eyes widen, and his mask split wide open and fall away. Excitement spilled out of him, replaced with a horrible fear, that Kate and Mozzie would be swept up with Adler and his cronies, and the actions he had undertaken to spare them would be the ones to doom them instead.

"I'm glad Sara bought you." Peter stood up and came over to put his hand on Neal's shoulder. "I mean, I'm glad you're alive. When we captured you, I thought... I'll try to keep Kate and your friend out of it."

"Wait," Sara grunted. "You need _my_ permission."

Peter stared at her. Neal didn't blame him. He fought not to gape. "What?" Peter gasped, nonplussed.

Sara's lips turned up. It looked painful. "Well, I'm the one who has to live with him if you piss him off."

Peter held out his hand, palm up in entreaty. "Do I have your permission to use your slave as bait to catch Adler?"

Sara raised an eyebrow. "Neal?"

He shrugged and tossed his head. "Yeah, fine."

Sara nodded to Peter. "Alright."

o0O0o

The late evening sky and the sun sunk below the horizon lay the shadows thick and heavy over the city towers. The pillars that held up each city level cut the sky into pieces, and the lights in front of every shop, restaurant, and apartment glimmered in a myriad of soft colors. Neal watched them fly past from the inside of the pod. "You didn't just force me to go along with Peter's plan."

The unsaid question in his words wasn't hard to hear. Sara turned to him, her face obscured by the gloom. "We don't have time to out-stubborn you on this."

"That's the whole reason," said Neal, disbelievingly.

"Yep." Sara crossed her legs. "Well. And you haven't told me who the fence was, yet."

Neal folded his hands behind his head and leaned back on them. "Well, thanks."

Sara turned back to face forward. "I'd like the name of the fence now, by the way."

Neal's teeth glinted in the shifting lights. "How do I know you aren't going to sell me down the river as soon as I give you her name?"

"Well you'll just have to trust me."

"Yeah, I don't really do that," Neal said, disappointed. Or falsely disappointed, it was hard for him to tell sometimes anymore.

"I haven't screwed you over yet," Sara reminded him.

The smile on Neal's face grew rueful as he shook his head. "It's a lot easier to trust someone when you don't have to."

Sara stood up and walked across the moving floor of the pod to face him. Bending over Neal, she tipped is chin up. "I am _not_ going to screw you over." She held him there until his eyes focused on her "I will help you, and when this is all over, I will let you escape. I promise."

Neal let his head sink down to his chest when she let it go. "Let me think about it."

"Alright." She went back to sit next to him. "It's late. I'll buy dinner tonight, give you the night off."

o0O0o

She pulled her memglass into a wide, flat surface. Hanging it up on the wall on which he had drawn her missing Raphael, she brought up a screen with the movies that had come out that year in neat little rows. "You want to watch a movie with me?"

Neal stood in the study door. "I'm going to bed. It's late."

"Come on," Sara snorted. "It isn't that late."

"I don't really..." Neal shrugged. "Do movies."

"Why not?" Sara demanded. "You like art. There are plenty of highbrow movies here. We can watch one of them."

"I just don't like them." Neal glowered for a moment at the memglass hanging on the wall before tamping down on it and turning to Sara impassively. "I don't like the way they're art made on the backs of people who have no choice. Who can't refuse to make it, or choose to make something else. And you know, when have you ever seen a slave in a movie?"

 _"Heart of Silver,"_ Sara shot back.

Neal waved her answer away. "Only so that there would be someone around to spy on Taylor Yen's character and his boyfriend."

"You can't tell me you're really some great anti-slavery revolutionary." She laughed at him over the top of the back of the couch. "You use all kinds of things made by slaves. You eat the food I buy you, grown by slave-"

"Cooked by a slave too," Neal cut in.

"You wear clothes made by slaves, the clothing you wore when you were caught was probably made by slaves..." She smirked at him. "You just don't want to be a slave yourself."

 _Would you?_ Neal wanted to ask. "It's impossible to _live_ without benefiting from slavery! At least the way I do it, the people who own the slaves don't get any money."

"Oh, you're going to claim you stole for a good cause," she snarled. "Don't try it. You stole for yourself."

"Because I couldn't get a job!" Neal let himself glare at her. "I didn't have any identity records. I didn't know how to do anything. My first partner had to teach me how to read."

Sara's expression grew softer. "You think you might not have been a thief if you hadn't been a slave?" she asked.

"Maybe." Neal looked down. "I don't know."

Sara stood up with a sigh and folded her memglass back up into its normal cube shape. "I'm sorry."

"Sure."

"You can make your own identity records now. You do it all the time for cons." She came over to put a hand on his shoulder. "You learned how to be a thief, you can learn how to do something else, once you're free."

Neal smiled sadly. "Sure," he said again, believing it just as much as she did.

o0O0o

When he woke up the next morning, Neal opened the study door to find the clothes he had been captured in folded and waiting for him. He picked them up and took them into the bathroom, and when he came out again, damp from his shower, he was dressed in them, the collar of his shirt pulled up to hide the glass collar as best he could. "Thanks," he said to Sara.

"We're meeting Agent Burke for lunch." She sat at the table with her memglass open, memos from work and news sites littering it. "So you and Vincent Adler, huh?"

Neal stuck four slices of bread into the toaster and dug a bottle of grape jelly out of the back of the refrigerator. "Yeah."

"What did you do to him?" she asked, failing to hold in a laugh.

"What are you talking about?" he snapped, pulling the toast out and slathering the jelly onto them. "I didn't do anything to him."

She looked at him skeptically. "The woman he sent to speak to me implied pretty strongly that he wanted to buy you to get revenge because you conned him out of a lot of money. Not that I blame you if you did, but..."

"No." He'd tried, but that was a finer distinction than he was willing to make. "He doesn't want revenge. He thinks I'd be useful. He probably wants someone good at making aliases and counterfeiting documents."

"That's all?" Sara took the plate with her toast on it when he handed it to her. "No blood, no pain? Maybe I should have sold you."

"Wait," he said, startled. "You didn't sell me because you were worried about me?"

"Eat your breakfast."

"You were," he said gleefully. "Well thanks."

"So why do you want Adler arrested?" she asked, honestly curious and not bothering to hide it. "How did you meet him, anyway?"

He didn't smile. "That really isn't any of your business."

"Fine, but Agent Burke's probably going to ask too."

He stood there while she ate. "You're going to ask me to trust you again, aren't you?"

"You should," she said. "Go on, eat. I have to get to work."

o0O0o

Peter waved them into his office and shut the door, pushing a button on a nearby wall panel. The glass walls fogged over, turning black and opaque, obscuring them from the agents milling around the bullpen below. "You said that Adler contacted you. Do you have a way of contacting him?"

"He sent me a letter to reply to if I changed my mind," Sara said, taking a seat in front of his desk.

"He said he would come back to Sara's apartment in a few days to talk to me again." Neal's expression was cold, closed off. He stood off to the side of the room, next to the door, muscles coiled, as if ready to jump away from them, if he could have. "He wanted me to promise that I would behave myself before he bought me."

Peter snorted, "How did you meet him anyway?" Sara shot her slave a wry grin.

Neal glared back. "I don't think that's really something you need to know."

"No, I think it is," Agent Burke responded heatedly.

"Then you're out of luck," Neal said.

"Remember, you're a slave." He put his hands on top of the table. It was a conman's trick, seeing someone's hands told the subconscious that the person wasn't hiding anything, and seeing the FBI agent pull it made Neal squirm inside. "It's not like you can be convicted and sent to jail. Unless you're about to tell me that you did something that we would have to put you down for, I don't know, something violent-"

"No," he interrupted. "Nothing violent."

"Then you have nothing to worry about," Peter told him mildly triumphant, sitting back.

"You can't make me tell you." Which anymore had become enough of a reason not to do anything, even without the humiliation the story held, about the time _he_ had gotten conned, and he had been the one at he end of the day wondering how he had been left with nothing. The knowing looks, the yes-we-really-are-smarter-than-you expressions, he didn't need to see those. He didn't need to give them more confirmation for their belief that they, free people, were somehow more, that _Adler_ was somehow better than he was. Something in him recoiled from telling the story in front of people that would ignore his every success and point to his every failure and hold them up as proof.

He had breathed free, and met free people, and the things he hadn't questioned when Keller had first found him and used him as a partner were things he couldn't stomach anymore.

"No, I can't," Peter acknowledged. "But if you don't tell me, I can't know what I'm supposed to protect your friends from. If they get caught up in this..."

Neal swallowed. "For all I know, you're working with Adler. Somebody is. Why'd you pick 'James Bonds' anyway? Fan of classic literature?"

"Or centuries old two dimensional movies," Sara cut in helpfully before giving her slave a strange look.

"He told you that?" Peter asked, voice flat with surprise. At Neal's nod, he let out a tense breath. "That's... just something we called you here until- That didn't go into any of the files. You realize that means he has someone in this department feeding him information?"

"Yeah, I figured that out," Neal returned mirthlessly.

The agent flinched. Neal turned his gaze on Sara, and her closed off, calculating expression. When she noticed him watching, her eyes flashed, and she glowered at him as if she wished he were closer so she could hit him. It was the kind of look he could smirk back at, and not be afraid of punishment to follow. It was a contradiction written on her face, a look she would give to someone who wasn't powerless, even as she would never let him forget that was just what he was, even if she sometimes did forget.

Neal let it pass without comment.

"You have my word that I won't tell Adler anything," Peter broke the silence. "I'm not the leak."

Neal cocked his head. "If your word means anything."

Peter swallowed, the muscles along his jaw jumping. "It does."

Neal stepped further away from him, his back to the closed office door. "Or you could use what I tell you to make a case against my friends instead of keeping them out of it."

Peter nodded. "Or I could do that."

"But you won't," Neal prompted, hesitating.

"But I won't."

Neal glanced at Sara, at the blank black walls. "I tried to con him," he said at last, forcing the words out. Beginning something, it always seemed to him, was the hardest part, so he supposed it was best to begin with the hardest part of all, so that after it came out, it would all be down hill and everything else would come out easily. "Back when everybody thought he was an investment genius. Instead he ran off with my money too."

And the rest of the story did come out of him easily, like water through a broken dam, the memories in sharp, clear focus. But it was the things he didn't mention that came back to him the most strongly, the way he had been when he had first met Mozzie, new in New York, back on the North American continent for the first time since he had escaped, still reeling from realizing just what kind of a man Matthew Keller really was, and only just finally getting used to seeing himself as a free man and a criminal instead of a slave. The way he had seen Adler and wanted to become him, and the way he had thought, for at least a little while that maybe he could give up the grift if Adler just taught him how. The look on Kate's face when she found out what Adler had done, and the hard knot of fear that had settled in his chest, that when he told her what he was doing there, she would look at him the same way. When it had happened, when Adler had conned all of those people, Neal felt like an idiot, furious that someone could do that to them, and that he had let him, but Kate, Kate looked like the world had just ended around her, and Neal had never loved her more than when he wanted to wrap her up and carry her away from it all.

His eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them as he spoke. When he had finished, he stretched his arms up and folded them behind his head, feeling his jaw set defiantly, feeling the muscles in his body growing taut.

"I thought you told me you didn't try to con him," Sara said slowly.

"I never said I didn't try," he shot back. "Nobody wants revenge against the con artists who _don't_ fool them."

"So he conned you," Sara mused, recovering. "Learn anything?"

Neal forced his eyes not to narrow and smiled at her pleasantly. "Anybody can be a mark, Sara, I already knew that."

Peter hadn't spoken since Neal had begun his story. He coughed. "So he knew Kate before you met her." The other two dragged their eyes away from each other. "And she's the one who asked him to buy you."

Neal pushed himself away from the wall and stepped into the middle of the room, Mozzie's constant possessive suspicion of her ringing in his ears. "What are you suggesting?"

"If she knows how to contact him, we can use that."

"Lure him into a trap?" Sara cut in, interested.

"Like you did with me?" Neal raised his eyebrows. "You like doing that, don't you?"

"You didn't have to walk into it," the agent snapped.

"Feeling guilty about almost sending me to my death?" Neal let his charm disappear, the shadow of it lingering in the room as a warning. "Did you even tell her what you were doing, or did you just float her name around, and tell everybody where she was going to be, and hope that nobody used that information to put a laser bolt through her?"

Peter Burke flushed with guilt. "She wasn't running from anybody but you."

"You didn't know that!"

Sara stood up and walked over to Neal to put her hand on the memglass collar around his neck. Grasping it tightly, she tugged head down. "Calm down."

Neal's eyes flicked around, the irises and pupils glittering up at her through thin, furious slits.

"She'll know about it this time." Peter Burke gazed at them, trying to hide his alarm. Instead of sympathy for him, a sharp spike of resentment stole over Neal instead. Sara's uncertain way of dealing with him was nothing like the overseers on the farm he had grown up on. Next to them, her improvisations were uninventive and almost kind. If he hadn't known freedom before her, it would almost have felt like heaven. If Peter didn't want to deal with a cruelty even as mild as Sara's, he didn't have to. It was his choice. He could look away from the slavery that made his life so much easier, that brought him food and clean clothes, that paid his salary, and filled the Global Federation's treasury. And it made Neal sick.

Sara let her slave up. Neal shoved his shoulders up as if he could hide the collar, then he shrugged and straightened up. "You better tell her. I'm only helping you because it's safer than having Adler out there with his hooks in my friends. But if that changes..."

The agent heaved a sigh. "I'll let you talk to her."

o0O0o

Sara kept her hand on Neal's collar as she walked him through the door to her apartment. "Don't think helping out the FBI is going to make me forget you promised to give me the fence."

"What- oh!" Neal followed her through the doorway without stopping or flinching away, keeping his body loose, and deceptively unruffled. "Yeah."

Her fingers tapped the surface of the collar, steadily entering in the code that would shackle hi to the apartment again. "I'm waiting."

"Don't you have to go back to work?" Neal asked pointedly. "I mean, this is already a really long lunch hour-"

"If anyone asks, I'll tell them I'm running down a lead." Sara leaned back against the wall, arms folded, and smiled at him like she had all the time in the world. "It's the truth. See how that works?"

"I want to talk to them first." He told her. "I'm not inflicting you on anybody without warning them."

"Aww, and here I thought we were starting to get along," she shot back. "I don't want you tipping whoever it is off and having them head for the hills before I can talk to them. No."

Neal directed his eyes up to the ceiling in exasperation. "Look, I want to get out of here, alright? You'll get the painting. But I'm not giving you a name unless I get to talk to them first."

"Fine," Sara snapped, pulling out her memglass and powering it on. "Call them. I'll be right here listening."

"Not a chance."

"Haven't you gotten it through your head yet? I'm not stupid, Neal!" She rounded on him, backing him against the wall. "I'm not just going to let you call one of your friends up and say, 'Hey, please, break into Sterling Bosch for me and grab the slave chip deactivator out of Sara Ellis's desk!'"

"That's not-"

"Shut up," she said tiredly. "Did you even fence it, or was this all some little ploy of yours to try and trick me into letting you use the phone?"

Neal took a breath. "Okay, so I didn't fence the Raphael-"

"Ha!" she broke in. "God, you bastard."

"You'll get it. And you'll get your two percent." He felt like shouting, He wanted to shout, but instead he kept his voice low and calm, persuasive, trying for once, to sell the truth. "I'm going to call one of my associates to pick it up. You don't get to know where I've been keeping it." He reached up to touch the collar around his neck as Ellen's face flashed across the surface of his mind.

"I told you, I'm not going to mess with your stash," she said coldly.

"I wouldn't tell any of my associates where my stash was anyway," he did his best not to snarl. He might not have been any kind of anti-slavery crusader, Sara had seen that easily enough, but the thought of Ellen being captured and collared, sent to a slow, working death, as he had thought he would be, was enough for him to sentence himself to slavery for the rest of his life. "This isn't about that."

"Then you're protecting _someone._ " Sara fired back shrewdly. "I won't drop the dime on anyone either."

"And why should I believe that?" Neal asked. Sometimes, it was like that, when all of his frustration and uselessness slammed into him at once. She couldn't see it, and there was no way for him to make her.

"Fine!" she spat, voice horribly loud in the small entrance way of her apartment. "I'll let you call your associate, but I want you to remember something. You try to run before I have the Raphael, every law enforcement agency in the world will know you're on the loose. You will be caught, your friends will go to jail for stealing you, and you'll be returned right back here to me, where I won't be letting you out of that bathroom until I have that painting!"

Neal gritted his teeth. "Just give me the memglass."

She pulled it out of her pocket and dangled it in front of him between her thumb and index finger, letting the glass stretch and flatten as it swung, like taffy. The screen shimmered and went opaque as she slid it into her palm and typed in the access code. She handed it over. "Behave yourself."

Shooting her a pained smile, Neal took it and waited for her to leave.

Her bedroom door closed with a soft click and Neal began dialing. It wasn't until the fifth number he tried that he heard a phone ringing on the other end, and at that moment, it was the best sound in the world.

The screen stayed blank when someone on the other end answered, but Neal had been expecting that. "Feathers, Fur, and Scales Pet Shoppe, we sell, food, toys, supplies, and equipment for everything from dogs and cats to exotic fish and reptiles-"

"Cut it out, Moz." He ran his hand through his hair one handed. "I need to talk to Kate, and we didn't exactly get a chance to exchange contact information before the FBI dragged me away last time. You know how I can-"

"Neal?" The screen flipped on and Kate's face swam into view. "Is that really you?"

"Yeah." He dropped the hand that he had been combing through his hair and brought the memglass closer to his face.

"Oh God." The breaths that she drew in were deep and shaky. "Thank God! So Adler bought you? You're safe? You're coming home?"

Neal shook his head, vaguely disappointed that she hadn't asked if he had escaped. Not that it really mattered. He'd have just had to tell her he hadn't managed it. "Adler didn't buy me." At her indrawn hiss, he continued, "I'm safe. I don't want him to buy me, I think I can get free on my own, but I need a favor."

o0O0o

Sara swung herself down off her bed and over to the door at his knock. Neal had the memglass in his hand, still open and blinking. Taking it from him, she folded it up and slipped it into her pocket. "So?" she said at last. "How did it go?"

He held his hands up for a second, then let them fall to his sides. "Thanks."

"What?"

"For trusting me," he said at her nonplussed expression. "Means a lot."

"Please," she snorted derisively. "People trust you all the time. It's how you're able to con people."

Neal inclined his head.

"Besides," she smirked painfully. "I'm not trusting you. We both know what would happen if you tried to run out on me. You're smart enough to give me what I want."

"It's still trust." He stood just beyond the doorway with a disarming smile, his harmlessness a complete _lie,_ and it wasn't like they didn't both know it. She didn't know why he bothered. "It's cute."

"Like a five-year-old?" She prompted, remembering.

He smiled. "Yeah."

"I bet you were an obnoxious five-year-old."

He pretended to pout. "I was incredibly charming."

"Not mutually exclusive." She shook her head wryly. "I should get going."

He stood to the side and watched her shut the apartment door behind her.

But as soon as she had stepped into the pod, the door had closed, and it had begun to move, she pulled out her memglass and hit play on the recording it had made of Neal's call.


	4. Chapter 4

00316618525

Part IV

The woman who answered the apartment door smiled at Kate the way a person usually smiled at strangers, distantly. So Kate folded her hands behind her back. "Neal sent me."

The woman pulled the door open wide. "Come inside."

"My name's Kate." She felt her lips shaping themselves into the smile Neal had taught her, in her first fumbling days as a con artist. But this woman knew Neal. She would know the smile. Kate let it drop. "I'm supposed to pick up something?"

"Yes, of course." She shut the door behind both of them, and looked at Kate. "You know, I always kind of hoped he would come for it himself. I'm Ellen, by the way."

"Pleasure." But Ellen had walked off down the hallway. Kate followed. As the other woman shuffled through the boxes on the top shelf of a hall linen closet, Kate ran her hand through her hair nervously. "So you knew Neal from... before?"

Spinning around with a poster box in one hand, Ellen's eyes thinned into pinched, anxious slits. "What do you mean by that?"

Kate held her hands up with a reassuring smile. "I'm not going to turn you in. I'm a friend."

"Neal wouldn't tell anyone," she growled. "He knows better."

Kate stayed back, voice soothing, "He didn't tell me. He got caught. I'm going to help him bust out, but I need what he's been hiding here..."

But Ellen had sagged heavily against the wall. "How?"

Kate's stomach twisted as her mind went to how the FBI had found Neal, how they had used her to do it. "Doesn't matter. What matters is I'm going to get him out."

Ellen held the poster tube up and looked at it dubiously. "And you need this."

Kate shrugged. "Neal said so."

"Any idea what's inside?"

Shrugging again, she held her hand out for it. "Something he-" She stopped, uncertain as to how much she should say.

"Something he stole?" Ellen supplied, making no move to give it to her. "I know what he does for a living."

Kate nodded. "They arrested him. And when they ran his prints..."

Holding out the poster tube, Ellen met her eyes. "Yes, I knew Neal from before. I watched him grow up, and I helped him escape, and if you aren't planning to help him, I will find you."

Kate grimaced. "I'll tell him to visit after he gets out."

o0O0o

The pod sped along one of the steel lines, hung between the five city towers like the thin, sticky strands of a spider web. Kate kept one arm snugly around the cardboard poster tube as she stretched out her memglass and called the memglass Neal had called her from. A woman answered, mouth set with suspicion, and Kate gathered up her courage. "I want to speak to Neal."

"I suppose you must be Kate Moreau," the woman said, without softening her expression. "Agent Burke told me about you."

"I want to speak to Neal," Kate repeated, undeterred. "I have business."

The woman snorted. "He's a slave. I own him. Any business you have with him, you have with me." Kate moved to fold up the memglass, but the woman held up a hand to stop her. "Just tell me you picked it up?"

"Picked what up?" Kate widened her eyes in a parody of innocence, then glanced at the poster tube and tilted the memglass until it was in view. "Oh, you mean this?"

"Well I can't tell from the outside of the box." The woman sighed. "But if that is what it's supposed to be, you give it to me, Neal goes free."

"So what is this thing, anyway?" Kate asked, picking it back up. "Neal was a little light on the details."

The woman on the other end of the memglass tucked her reddish hair behind her ear. "Why don't you just open it and find out?"

"You don't mind?" Kate asked carefully. It isn't going to fall into dust, or start rotting, or anything, if I expose it to air?"

"Would I have suggested it if anything like that was going to happen?" she asked with exaggerated patience.

Kate's mouth twitched. "You want me to open it, don't you? You want to make sure this package is what Neal told you it was. You aren't afraid I'll decide to steal it?"

"If you want to open it, just open it." The woman shot her a peevish look.

Kate popped the top off the poster tube. The rolled up canvas inside slid out with a faint whoosh. Tentatively, she unrolled the bottom of the canvas, terrified the oil from her hands, or the dirt from the pod cushion would ruin its delicate structure. With the edge of her nail, she held it open just far enough to see the flowers and leaves on the painted ground, the white hoof of a horse, and the black claws of a dying beast.

"Raphael's Saint George and the Dragon," Kate said, trying to sound calm as she turned the memglass so that the woman on the other end of the line could see the partially unrolled painting. "The real one?"

The woman swallowed audibly. "So he says."

"He never told me he-" Kate banged her head back against the outer wall of the pod. "Damn it, Neal!" She picked the memglass back up and smiled politely at the woman in the screen. "I have to go now. You'll get your painting when Neal's free."

"That's not-" but Kate had already hit end, and the woman's face vanished.

"Neal, you shit!" Kate hissed into the empty pod.

o0O0o

All that time she had spent, planning out the theft of that Raphael, and the frustrated fury she had felt when someone else stole it first, and it had been her miserable stalker ex-boyfriend, who had known she had wanted to go after that painting anyway, who had stolen it out from under her. And he put it in a poster tube. He knew better than that. It was a priceless painting, not a forged movie poster they planned to pretend they found in the attic for some quick cash.

She rolled it up and slipped it back into the poster tube with a harsh breath dragging its way out of her throat.

o0O0o

He was waiting for her in the doorway when she came home from work that evening. "Bad day?" she asked?

Neal's eyebrows knit together. "No, why?"

It really, thought Sara, should have been harder for her to read him, and see through the great Neal Caffrey, and she wondered if it were her, if living with him, and seeing him day in and day out had taught her what was real about him and what wasn't. Or if his pretense, his clever facade, was finally showing the cracks. He kept his eyebrows high, his face serious as he waited for her to answer, and seeing him barely try, was worse than if he hadn't tried at all. Sara lifted her own eyebrow. "No reason, Caffrey, you're just waiting at my door like a puppy."

Neal scowled.

"Your girlfriend called me today."

"What did she say?" Neal's false serious expression froze and then cracked, leaving behind a disquieting intensity, a thousand emotions coiled together. "How did she look?"

"You know what she looks like, Caffrey, you saw her yesterday." She slipped her memglass out of her purse and into her pocket. "It's not like she looked any different today. She has the Raphael." She looked at him slyly. "And now she knows what the painting is."

Neal blanched. "Great, thanks for telling her."

She gave him a slow smile. "Afraid she's going to run off with it and leave you here?"

"And you aren't?" he challenged. "You're the one who wants the Raphael so badly.

"Oh please, you saw her, she's guilt..." Sara realized almost as soon as she stopped that the words weren't incriminating by themselves, but it was too late. "She's guilty, and anything she does to screw you over, she'll wait to do after she's gotten you out."

"You watched our conversation from yesterday." He said it mildly, which didn't reassure Sara at all.

"What did you think I was going to do?" she retorted. "For all I knew, you were you were planning your escape. I wanted to be prepared."

"Of course," he said through gritted teeth. "You're too smart not to be. Of course. You're the one with all the power, listening in on my conversations, spying on me, but you can' trust _me."_

"You're a con artist!" She threw up her hands. "You lie for a living, Neal, God damn it, of course I don't trust you. Look, I'm not going to do anything with that address. I already deleted the conversation from my memglass. Whoever your friend is, she's safe, but I'm not going to trust you, and you're just going to have to deal with that for as long as you have to be here."

For a heartbeat, he looked like he was going to cry. "And why should I trust _you?"_

"Fine, don't trust me." She snapped. "Be afraid." It wasn't like there was anything he could do about it, and it didn't matter to her, really.

Neal put his head back against the wall to her apartment and sighed, resting his weight against it, fighting down a scream of frustration. She wasn't going to get it, and it didn't matter anyway, because once he was out of there, he never planned to see her again. It wasn't his habit to go around trying to convince everyone he met that the whole bedrock of their society was wrong and rotten to its core. Most of the time, he did his best not to bring it up at all. "You called me a con artist," he said at last. "This is progress."

He watched her face freeze and slowly shift into absolute bewilderment, as if she just couldn't connect the two, as if what he just said bore no relation at all to the conversation, and like every time she thought she had a handle on the way his brain worked, he did this to her. _"What?"_

"You called me a con artist instead of a slave." He smiled. "It's improvement. Someday you might actually have to acknowledge that I'm a human being."

She closed her eyes for a long moment, before ducking into the kitchen to unlock the refrigerator for him. "I'm going to be setting you free as soon as your mess with Adler's straightened out, and I have that Raphael," she called from inside. "I'm just getting myself used to it. Oh God, the thought of you loose on the world again."

Neal trailed behind her. "Why wait for the Adler thing to be done with? I thought all you wanted was the painting."

Sara stopped, her hands ridged and tense over the refrigerator handle, waves of heat and cold chasing each other over her body. "I wouldn't do that to you."

Neal's lips quirked up in a small smile of acknowledgment.

"Is that what you wanted to hear?" Sara heard herself demand, so furious that she could barely feel her lips move. "How do you do that?"

"What are you _talking_ about?" Neal nearly yelled in shock and sudden frustration.

And abruptly, Sara felt very, very stupid. "Never mind. Make dinner. I'll be in the living room."

As she left the kitchen, his baffled gaze following her made the hairs on the nape of her neck bristle.

o0O0o

Neal set a plate with seared salmon and steamed asparagus in vinaigrette in front of her on the coffee table. "I didn't _make_ you start thinking of me as human, but it was nice to hear you say it."

She shot him a halfhearted look of irritation. "Not even you're that good."

"No, I'm not."

She looked back to her food, but the couch shifted under his weight as he sat down, and if she wanted to, she knew she could have moved a couple of inches and be touching him. "You can't be all that different from other slaves."

His hand made an abortive move to touch the collar around his neck. He was a thief, and a liar, cleverness and charm didn't change that. He was a criminal, descended from criminals, and exactly why people like him were enslaved in the first place.

Mouth twisted in a tight grimace, Neal glanced away, as if he knew what she was thinking. "I am what my owners made me."

"Don't blame them. I told you, you had to learn how to be a thief, you could have picked something else," she sighed with exhaustion, cutting the asparagus into pieces and eating one. "A cook for instance. These aren't bad."

They were perfect, and she knew it, and Neal barely restrained himself from telling her so. "I was owned by Atlantic Securities."

"The company whose bonds you were arrested for forging." Sara raised an eyebrow. He wondered if she had already known. It should have been on the contract she signed when she bought him.

"Oh, so that's what I was arrested for."

She snorted. "Revenge was probably the best idea you've ever had, Caffrey."

"Well anyway," he cut in. "When I as thirteen, they shuffled a bunch of us around, and I ended up at a factory, making those bonds I was arrested for forging."

"Peter had been wondering about those." She took another bite. "Hardly anybody bothers to forge the paper ones."

"I don't know why." Spreading his arms wide, Neal leaned back against the couch. "All you have to to is pretend you found a couple of them that your grandparents got you for graduation, and you'd forgotten about. Nobody ever questions them."

"Because anybody who can program the chips on those things can just hack in and put the extra money right into any account they wanted to?"

Neal gave her another wide eyed smile. "People start getting curious when money just shows up in your account."

Sara shot him a sideways glance, mouth full of salmon.

Propping his own plate up on his knees, Neal shoved hard against the memories, of the bonds he had made and stolen, and Keller, finding him trying to trade them for an identity. Keller must have thought he had hit the jackpot, Neal realized now, but he had thought Keller was being so kind. He caught Sara's eye for a second, and looked away, letting the silence stretch thin before he spoke. "I know only one other escaped slave, and she, aside from escaping and living under false papers, has never broken a law in her life."

"Aside from that." Shaking her head, she picked up a forkful of fish, and then stopped, the fork halfway to her mouth. "The woman you sent Moreau to."

A brief, wry smile flashed across his face and was gone.

"Don't forget receiving stolen property."

"Not that she knew." At her look, he conceded, "She probably guessed."

"How do you know her anyway?" Sara busied herself with her food and shot him a quick, covert glance. "Since you said she's the only one you know, I'm guessing there's no secret underground network of escaped slaves."

Neal stared pointedly away from her. "Were you hoping there was one, and maybe some of them would have been insured by Sterling Bosch?"

She bristled. "I'm not asking so I can score a commission!"

"I'm kidding." He flashed her a tight, false smile.

"Yeah, I believe that," she shot back, and put her face in one hand. "Honestly, what do you think I'm trying to do? Round up all the slaves in the world and save my company a few bucks? All I want is that painting, and then once I get it, I'm letting you go! I'm protecting you from Adler, and he offered me a lot of money for you, so if that was all I cared about-"

The salmon shredded under the prongs of his fork. "Then what do you care about?"

The hand came away from her face, and tightened into a fist before unclenching. "I'm not the monster here!"

So who is, Neal wanted to ask. All the really awful things were still done, with no one to take the blame. "No, you aren't."

The lines on Sara's forehead deepened and pressed together, and she shook her head as if it hurt. "Then why do you treat me like one?"

"I'm not." Neal took refuge in his dinner and swallowed bite after bite of the fish he had mangled. The silence spun and stretched between them like a wire spring. He clutched tight to it and tried to pretend it wasn't there. "But you would think I was being really pushy if I asked all about your childhood, so do you get to ask about mine?"

"So you met her when you were a child," Sara said, and Neal winced. "Good to know."

He watched her swallow down her questions, unsure if he was supposed to be happy, because she was trying, or furious that trying that little bit was the most he could ask of her.

o0O0o

Agent Burke looked up as she came into his office and sat down across from him. "Hello, Kate."

"Peter." She used his first name carefully, since he was going to use hers. "Neal said you needed to talk to me."

"So you are in contact." His face lit up before he could cover.

She smiled tightly. "If we had been in contact before, I wouldn't have to be here now."

"Then he told you what this is about?" the agent prompted.

"My old boss?" she asked in a parody of wide-eyed innocence.

Agent Burke didn't bother to acknowledge that, and Kate had trouble keeping the corners of her mouth from twitching upwards. It hadn't been a shining moment for the FBI when no one in the entire FBI had noticed the presence of Neal Caffrey and Kate Moreau in the file of one of the biggest financial crimes in the Global Federation's history, she knew. Nor had it been a shining moment in Agent Peter Burke's career, she was sure. "And he told you we're not after you, that whatever help you give us will not be used against you?"

"You don't have to sell me on it." She let out a soft, amused huff. "I wouldn't have come in if I weren't going to help."

"How did you contact Adler?" Kate wondered if Neal had actually told him Kate had contacted the man, or if he was fishing.

Kate decided it didn't matter. It wasn't like she minded him knowing. "Not since he left the continent. I went poking around in some of his old business accounts and addresses, and hoped for the best. He called me. Said he'd been watching Neal and me both for a while." She leaned forward. "I would really like you to arrest him."

Peter folded his hands on top of the desk, making pixelated shadows, like ink blots flutter on the surface of the memglass stretched over the surface of the desk. "I need you to square with me. No games, my people's lives could be at stake, not to mention yours. Do you think Adler is a violent man?"

"I don't know. I've never seen him be violent." She heaved a sigh. "But I never thought he was stealing all that money either. I have no idea what he's going to do. Never have."

"He scares you."

She acknowledged that with a tilt of her head.

"But you're the one who brought him in."

"What was I supposed to do?" Kate felt her eyes slam closed and her teeth clench in her open mouth. and the words kept coming. "I thought- you know what I thought. We couldn't find him anywhere, and I never would have brought Adler in if I'd known Neal managed to land himself in a nice little uptown apartment. I thought he was going to die if I didn't!"

Agent Burke's arm began its tentative journey towards her, to offer some kind of clumsy attempt at comfort, but Kate flinched back, and it froze midair above the desk before retreating. "Do you love him?"

"I don't know, maybe? I think so?" She didn't know why he had asked. _He_ didn't look like he knew why he had asked, and now that she was talking, he just looked uncomfortable. And she had no idea why she was telling him any of this, except who else was she supposed to tell? Not Mozzie, for whom she had to be the perfect loyal, loving girlfriend to Neal, or else endure his secrecy and plots that would just end with all of them in more trouble. Not Neal, with whom honesty had no value. "I think I love him just enough for us to be really really bad for each other, but I wasn't going to let him die. I wasn't going to let it be my fault. I don't have to be in love with him for that, right?"

"Well I guess not, um-"

Kate raised her hands up beside her shoulder, fingers spread wide. "We were going to get him free, and then that was it, I was-"

"We?" Agent Burke drew her up short.

'What?"

"You said we. Just now, and earlier. You're working with someone else, aren't you?" He let out a soft groan. "Of course. Of course you're working with someone else. Damn it, Kate."

Kate didn't answer.

"Just-" He didn't even bother rolling his eyes, or putting his head in his hand, or any of the other things he clearly wanted to do right then. "Whoever they are, keep them away from this. Don't let hem interfere. I don't need anyone getting hurt, or Adler getting away because of them."

"Don't worry." Kate's expression turned brittle. "I don't have a single associate who wants anything to do with Adler or the FBI."

"No, I didn't think you did." He sighed, tiredly.

"Just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll do it." She gulped down her irritation. "I'm not going to get anybody killed."

"You won't be there when this goes down," he told her reassuringly. "You won't be in any danger if you do what you're supposed to."

o0O0o

Kate's hands were still shaking as she gathered up the Raphael from its hiding place behind the broken panel of her dresser that Mozzie still hadn't found. She sagged with relief when she unrolled it and it was just as she had left it, and it was funny, but she hadn't even noticed she was worrying about it until then, because she was so worried about so many things all at once. The sun outside was setting, and Kate pulled on her coat and gloves to step out into the flurries of snow circling between her and the podline. She set the painting in its carrying case down on the seat beside her, and as the pod began to move, and lifted on its cable to fly through the lacework of the tower's outer walls, Kate swallowed. The pod bobbed on its line, and slid into the Manhattan tower, and Kate tried to think about everything in the world except what she was about to do for a man she never wanted to see again. Or wanted to see again very badly and needed never to see him again. Either way.

The pod shuddered to a stop in front of the apartment she had told it to, and the door opened with a faint click. Kate grabbed the painting. There was no reason to delay, not really, just her own purposeless reticence. The air outside the pod stung her face, and she let it shake her free of her own thoughts as her feet ate away the space between her and the apartment door. The doorbell rang inside, muffled through the door.

"What are you doing here?" Sara Ellis, the woman who had _bought_ Neal Caffrey stood on the other side of the threshold, drumming her fingers on the doorway like she really expected her to answer.

"Aren't you going to invite me inside?" Kate heard her voice, but the words hung in the air, disconnected from her. She held up the painting.

Sara's eyes, her whole face, narrowed with suspicion. "Okay, come on in and show it to me."

Kate smiled at the challenge and stepped inside.

"Who's at the..." Neal turned around. "Kate."

He had been stirring something in a pot on the stove, and Kate felt herself overcome with the memory of him at their table, getting something ready for the battered oven or stove-top that he had bought for aging paintings and other criminal activities, but which he had used so much more often to make food, one more art form that he just hadn't been able to bear not knowing for himself. Kate stared.

He didn't look like himself, with messy hair, and that glass collar sitting above that ridiculous tee-shirt. He didn't look like Neal Caffrey, or Nick Halden, or Steve Tabernacle, or any of the rest, who were slick and smooth, without blemishes, and imperfections to catch on to. But he looked a little bit like just Neal, and it _hurt._ He still held the spoon he had been using on one hand as he came forward, and stopped in front of her.

Kate grabbed him, pulled him into her, wrapping her arms tight around him. The painting's carrying case thumped into his back, and when his arms came up, halfway around her, cheese and cream flew off the spoon onto both of them, and she didn't care at all. "I still can't believe you're alive," she whispered, just hanging onto him.

"You're here," he said, not really in response, voice blank with shock. "You're here."

"Yes," she just said, feeling stupid.

"So," Neal began, collecting his thoughts after a long moment, "Adler said you went to him for me."

"M- We couldn't find you," She whispered, the awareness of Sara Ellis in the room with her almost a palpable thing. "And I didn't know who else to go to... I'm sorry."

He didn't say anything, leaving Kate to wonder if he could. It was like he had been struck mute. His mouth would occasionally open, but then it would close again without anything emerging from it. And she thought about Mozzie's name, which she had almost said in front of someone who could use it against them, and about the priceless Raphael, _Saint George and the Dragon_ , that Neal was willing to pay to get rid of the man she had brought in to help, and about the FBI, who he was willing to tangle them all up with to get them untangled from Adler. And she thought about Neal, who wasn't dying somewhere far away, but safe in her arms in some anonymous little apartment, and who probably had been full of his own plans to escape from here before she had forced his hand. When he regained his voice, it was rough, and strangely quiet. "You don't have to be sorry." He shook his head jerkily. "I just almost didn't believe it when he told me."

Which made her feel worse. A small part of her wondered dimly if that was Neal's goal. He was a con artist, wasn't he, and a born manipulator. But he had never wanted to hurt her before, she didn't think. "I love you, I do, but you're going to get me killed." Then Adler flashed across her mind once more. "Or I'm going to get you killed. Either way."

He grimaced. "You say that like we aren't perfectly capable of getting _ourselves_ killed."

The sound that escaped her was more air than mirth. "You say that like it's a good thing."

Behind them, Sara tugged the painting out of her unresisting fingers and cradled it. She lifted the top off and let the painting slide out into her waiting cotton gloved palm. Delicately, she unrolled a few centimeters of the canvas before rolling it back up, sliding it back into its case, and stripping off her gloves. "So," she cut in testily. "I hate to spoil the moment, but why did you bring me this now?"

Kate felt a nearly overpowering urge to snatch the painting out of her hands as she broke away from Neal. "You need to get it authenticated don't you? You know, if you don't want it, I can always take it back."

Glancing between the two of them, Neal turned and sauntered into the kitchen to turn off the burners on the stove and pour the noodles into a colander in the sink. Kate watched him, holding in a flash of envy at Sara Ellis's nice apartment with her nice kitchen, with all of the things Neal had tried to give her, and all of the things she wished she could give both of them. As he spun around on his heels and leaned back on the counter, he folded his arms, eyes glinting. He left her feeling as if he had put the two of them, her and Sara Ellis, on display.

"Look," she said, doing her best to ignore him. "It's just not as safe at my place as I'd like. I've got friends with sticky fingers."

Sara hugged the painting to her chest. "Well, lie down with dogs, I guess."

"Play nice, children," Neal broke in.

Sara ignored him. "So that means you trust a near total stranger over your own associates."

It was hard at that moment to remember that this woman was helping them, with Adler, and with the FBI. She smiled frostily at her. "How is that being nice?"

Sara snorted and Neal laughed. He looked down at the noodles like he had thought of something. "Hey, look," he said conspiratorially. "There's enough here for three."

Sara shifted closer to him and glanced over his shoulder. "That's supposed to be my lunch for tomorrow, isn't it?"

His eyes crinkled up when he grinned, and it was a real grin, that hurt for her to see. The good kind of hurt, Kate told herself, the hurt that came from happiness. "Yeah, I guess it is," he said, but he scooped out three bowls of pasta and strips of chicken breast, and poured alfredo sauce over each of them.

Capitulating gracefully, Sara turned to Kate. "Would you like to stay for dinner?"

Before Kate could answer, Neal slipped one of the bowls into her hands and put a hand on her back to guide her to a seat.

o0O0o

A heavy, contented lassitude filled him, and Neal knew he was probably drunk. Nudging his legs out of the way, Sara sank down next to him on the couch. "So that's Kate." She said wryly. "Nice girl."

"What's that supposed to mean?" He was too tired and feeling too good to fight, which he bet she knew, damn her.

"Nothing." Which meant something, he knew it. "She just reminds me of you."

"Hmm."

"And she's willing to give up the Raphael for you. Nice girl." Sara closed her eyes and settled down into the couch. "Why did she leave you again?"

"Go away."

She snickered at him.

He sighed. "You have your painting, you know. You don't have to annoy me into giving in now."

"That's true." She kept her eyes closed, head craned back to rest on the top of the couch. It didn't look particularly comfortable, to him. "You know I still have to get it authenticated."

"Yeah."

Sara opened her eyes and sat up straight. "It's little weird, seeing you with her. You're a lot alike. But she's a middle class art school grad, right?"

"Yeah." He waited for the other shoe to drop. It wasn't like he didn't know he'd made Kate into a crook.

"And you were a slave. It's just you're a lot alike, and it's weird."

Instead of answering, Neal glanced at her, then stared up at the ceiling.

"So what about little Neal Caffrey?" Sara asked. "What made you into the man Kate Moreau met?"

"Little Neal Caffrey wasn't," he pointed out. "And you know it."

"You know what I mean."

"You going to tell me about your childhood?" he asked her mildly.

Something flashed across her face, something strange and haunted, and there and gone, something that told him that what came out of her mouth next was a lie. "My childhood was boring."

"Oh, sure," he said. "You only say that because you lived it."

"So come tell me about the kid who grew up to be you."

Neal shrugged. "My childhood was boring too. No toys, no time to play, lots of rules and hard work, you know, slavery."

"No, I don't know," she murmured pensively. "It's not like I've ever been a slave."

And abruptly, he couldn't seem to stop himself from thinking about the way people looked through him when he was a slave, or looked at him but didn't see him, as if he didn't even register. "I was born on a produce farm. My mother was a slave, my father was an overseer. He left when I was three. I remember he used to carry me around on his shoulders and give me candy, and when he was on duty, I didn't have to work."

"Oh, so that's where it all went wrong," Sara said strangely, as if she didn't believe a word of it. "He spoiled you, and now you think you shouldn't be a slave."

"Yeah, because giving a kid a piece of candy every now and then, and giving him a break from working sixteen hour days picking worms of broccoli plants is spoiling him." The words came out bitter, and much more cutting than they had sounded in his head, and he knew he was probably too drunk to be talking about any of this. But of course, he never would have talked about any of this while sober. What a bind.

"I know," She put a hand on his shoulder, and waited for him to push it off.

He didn't. "So he went easy on us, my mom and me, and when he left, the other slaves were uh, jealous. It stayed that way right until I left. I don't think they even remembered why they were being mean to us after a while, just that they were. And Mom wasn't really, uh, all there, and when they transferred me and not her, it was almost a relief. I guess it shouldn't be."

Her hand gripped his shoulder, closed around it like a cage. "How old were you?"

"When they sent me to the print factory? Thirteen."

"Wow," Sara said quietly. She sat there for a moment, without speaking, and Neal found himself unable to break the silence for her. At last, she asked, "And the woman you left the Raphael with? Who is she?"

"So I said my mom wasn't all there, right?" at Sara's nod, he went on. "Ellen took care of us. The overseers had deputies, I guess, slaves who had special privileges that were supposed to help them keep the rest of us in line. Ellen was one of those."

"You escaped with her?" Sara prompted. He nodded, and then she thought of something. "But you said you were transferred."

"She was transferred with me, along with a couple of others. They told everybody about how she had worked for the overseers. Nobody trusted her after that. I guess I started taking care of her instead." After he finished, the silence lingered between them again like a nervous animal. And this time, he was the one who punctured it. "I don't know why. It's not like she chose to work for the overseers like that. They just picked her. That's the point."

"I'm sorry," she told him.

"I told you it was boring."

"You only say that because you lived it," Sara echoed.

"Oh no," he laughed bleakly. "It was boring. Hell, but boring. The same things that were wrong and making you unhappy one day were wrong and making you unhappy the next. And the next, and the next."

o0O0o

Angelo tugged on his sister's arm and whispered, "Can I stop pretending to be sick now?"

Barb sucked in a breath and prayed that the pod's microphone wasn't strong enough to pick up his words. She bent low over him and put her hand to his head, pretending to take his temperature. "Stop asking. I'll tell you when it's time."

The pod around them jerked and jostled through the levels of the city, and within its dark interior, it would have been easy for her to imagine that they were cut off from the world, alone. But they were never alone.

Each time the door opened, Barb held her breath, and each time she looked out on the wrong building, she gritted her teeth and trotted out of the pod for the bags of garbage left for her. When the door closed again behind her, she counted to herself, no, it's three stops after this, two stops after this, one more stop.

And when the pod door finally opened onto the address Neal had given her, she didn't even give herself time to draw a deep breath before she grabbed Angelo's hand and bolted out. "Okay, you can stop pretending to be sick now," she panted. She could feel him looking up at her like she was being stupid again, but she didn't care.

It was a warehouse, with nothing but locked metal doors and narrow walk ways as far as she could see. There was a dumpster tucked behind a low wall, she knew, but for the first time in her life, she ignored it. In her mind, she held the picture of the numbers Neal had drawn for her (maybe someday, if this worked, she could learn how to read numbers and letters like he he did) and ran down the walk ways, her brother's hand clenched tightly in her own.

Her heart pounded, and with it, she could feel the time on the timer ticking away inside her, ready to freeze her and her brother in place, to be found, and taken back, and sold off as runaways. _Please,_ she begged, _please let it still be green._

And then, she rounded a corner, and saw the numbers Neal had drawn for her hanging on the wall next to one of the metal overhead doors. With a last burst of speed, she lifted Angelo up into her arms and ran for it. She skidded to a halt in front of it, and banged on it with her fist as if her life depended on it, because it did, her life and Angelo's, and _please God, let this work._

The door slid open, and a short, balding man lowered his eyebrows at them. "What the-"

"Are you Mozzie?" Barb cut in breathlessly.

"Who's asking?" he snapped reflexively.

Barb figured that meant yes. She reached inside her filthy jumpsuit and pulled out the packet of napkins the strange slave who had sent her here had given her. "Neal told me to give you this."

Angelo stared up at her with wide, terrified eyes. "What are you doing?"

"I told you," she hissed. "We're escaping."

Mozzie's eyes flicked up from the napkins to her. "Get inside."

After he had closed the door behind them, Barb swallowed and looked around. It was small, with mismatched, broken furniture, and a bed shoved into the corner. An air of disrepair hung over everything. It... wasn't what she expected a free person's home to look like, but then what did she know about the homes of free people? They might as well have lived on the moon.

"Barb," Angelo asked uncertainly. "Who is this guy?"

"Hush," Barb told him.

The man read quickly, but Barb's heart hammered inside her, and time had slowed to a crawl. She could feel inside her the timer run out and the paralysis creep into her limbs, into her hands and feet, into her face, until she couldn't even blink her eyes. Her brother's hand was still in hers, his eyes shut tight.

The man, Mozzie, reached into a chest of drawers and pulled out a gray plastic contraption. "I can't believe he thought I wouldn't have one of these already," he grumbled. He glanced at Barb for a moment, perplexed by something, then bent over and unzipped her jumpsuit. She inhaled sharply. It was the only thing she could do, even as he pulled the jumpsuit off one arm, and tugged her hand out of her brother's so he could pull it off the other. As he raised the bottom of her threadbare gray undershirt, she wished she could scream, or throw up, or anything but just stand there and wait for him to do it.

Then, he just pressed the prongs of the gray thing to her chip and pushed a button. The skin around her chip prickled and stung. It made a soft tinkling sound as it landed on the concrete floor of Mozzie's home. All at once, she could move again, and she shivered and shook like a kitten in a thunderstorm. Her collar clicked open, and she yanked it off.

Angelo grabbed his collar and flung it down onto the concrete floor of Mozzie's home with a cheer.

"Not so fast, kid," Mozzie said, grabbing a bag and shoving things into it as fast as he could. "They're going to know where you were last. We got to get out of here."

o0O0o

Even though Mozzie had assured them that this was the last pod ride, Barb still couldn't make herself relax into the if not clean, than certainly cleaner than she was, seat in the public pod. Before today, she had never ridden in a public pod, and now this was her seventh time zipping along beside her brother and the strange little man who had rescued them at his friend's behest. Her seventh time because every time the pod doors beeped and slid open, he would lead them out of one pod, and down the nearest sidewalk, between the buildings, to another pod. Fleetingly, she wondered what they must have looked like to anybody looking out their windows, a twitchy man trailed so closely by a dirty girl and boy in ragged sweatpants and sleeveless undershirts, their breath rising in front of them like clouds in the cold air. But Mozzie was smart, and he must have done this before, because the streets he took them to had been deserted, and the walls that lined the alleyways he led them through, bare of windows. Barb wrapped her arms around herself and tried to rub away the goose bumps and the shivers that ran through her.

Angelo couldn't settle either. He bounced up and down on the balls of his feet excitedly, and Barb grabbed the back of his undershirt to pull him down next to her.

When the pod door beeped, Barb's breath rushed out of her. She jerked to her feet, hand still clawed tight around her brother's shirt. "Where is this place, anyway? she demanded suspiciously.

Mozzie eyed her exasperatedly. "Friend of Neal's place."

Angelo's eyes were stretched wide to take in the enormous edifice in front of him. "Do they own... all this?"

"Shh," Barb told him. _I'm sorry,_ she wanted to say. _He doesn't know any better. He's never been away from the plant before. All he knows is that free people own things._ Owned things like the two of them. Barb felt cold, in the winter afternoon, and inside herself. It was funny, how little she knew, and how much more she knew than her brother, from just walking where free people had walked, if only for a few moments, to haul away the things they had thrown away.

"She doesn't own any of it. She just rents a couple rooms." He opened the door and held it for them, and Barb stared at him, uncertain. "Come on. Don't touch anything. When we get upstairs, you're going straight into the shower. Ugh."

o0O0o

By the time Barb stepped out of the shower, a fluffy fleece bathrobe had been left on the counter along with towels. Barb swallowed hard. Mozzie must have come in while she was washing. He had come in while she was washing _and he hadn't peeked in on her._ She wondered if this was how all free men treated free girls.

She lifted the corner of the shower curtain. "Come on, Angelo, get out."

"But it's warm!" he whined.

Barb groped around inside the shower for the button she had used to turn it on in the first place. The water cut off in an instant. "Now it isn't anything. Get out."

He scowled at her as he got out and she wrapped him in a towel. Together, they padded into the main room of the apartment, Barb shifted a pile of art supplies off the couch so they could sit down. Mozzie was sitting on a chair in the corner, fiddling with his memglass.

"Mozzie," she began, uncertain if she was supposed to call him something else. "What are we supposed to wear if you threw away our clothes?"

He looked up and blinked owlishly at her. "I'm working on it.

o0O0o

There was sound coming from inside her apartment as Kate juggled a takeout box one handed and opened the door. "I didn't think you were coming over today, Moz-" She stopped and stared at the boy wrapped in a towel and the tangle haired girl sitting in her apartment in Kate's own bathrobe. "Mozzie, who are they?"

"That doesn't matter right now," he said excitedly. "I know where Neal is!"

"So do I!" the words spilled out before Kate knew what she was saying. "I don't see how-"

"You do?" Mozzie's expression grew suddenly sharp, and every word he spoke grew higher and higher. "How did you find out? Why didn't you tell me? You can't keep that kind of thing from m-"

"Mozzie!" Kate yelled. In the silence that followed, she drew an unsteady breath. "He called me. And I don't have to tell you anything." She knew him. She knew he wouldn't let it rest. She knew he would try to get clever, convinced he could have everything, the painting, Neal, their safety, no contact with the authorities... He was just like Neal. But Neal had given up the Raphael and gone to the FBI. The world was upside down. "Now, are you going to introduce me to the kids sitting my apartment, wearing my clothes?"

Mozzie shot the children a pointed look. The girl swallowed. "Barbra." she nodded at her brother. "Angelo."

"And, um." Kate smiled her con artist smile at them. "Why are you in my home?"

The girl and the boy looked at each other, and then, by some unspoken signal that wasn't given for her to read, they looked as one at Mozzie.

"Mozzie." Kate took the hint, drawing his name out. "Why did you bring them here?"

"Neal sent them," he said grudgingly. "They're escaped slaves. I didn't know what to do with them." The last part slipped out soft and unhappy, and Kate supposed none of them were supposed to hear it.

"And they don't have clothes," she said blankly. They had nothing. It was so plain. They had nothing and no one, except maybe, if they were lucky, each other, as if they had just come into the world. Kate's head felt heavy, and for a moment, she couldn't even begin to contemplate the process by which normal people acquired things, and people, and pieces of their lives, and absorbing those bits and pieces into themselves, without ever realizing what they were doing or had.

"I have already arranged for the delivery of suitable clothing to an undisclosed location." Mozzie held his hands up as if to fend off an attack. "You will not be permitted to follow me when I go to pick them up."

Kate wondered briefly what Mozzie thought of as suitable clothing. "I'm not after your secrets, Moz."

"Good, because you have just proven yourself to be unworthy of-"

Kate sighed. "Oh Mozzie."

"We don't have to stay!" The girl's eyes were huge with panic in her pinched face. "If you don't want us here, we can go-"

"Where?" Kate asked, horrified. There was a sharp, broken feeling, like glass shards caught in her heart at the idea that perhaps, a long time ago, Neal had looked like that, underfed and unwanted, and absolutely terrified, with no way to hide it. And she wondered who had seen him like that, before her, before Mozzie, before Adler, and what they had done with it. "Where would you go?"

The girl looked at the little boy wrapped in a towel. "I don't know."

"I'm not kicking you out," Kate told her. "You're staying here. I just..." Wasn't expecting any of this? Wasn't expecting the heavy dragging weight of responsibility for the two children that Neal had somehow propelled into her life, in some stomach twisting parody of their dreams and conversations about starting a family. Wasn't expecting any of it. She put her hands up in surrender. "Okay. Mozzie will get you your clothes, I'll get you something to eat, and we'll talk about where to go from there, okay?"

o0O0o

"I told my boss that you're here telling us where you hid everything you stole," Agent Burke told him, leaning out of his office door.

Neal looked up from the memglass he had been reading as he drummed his foot against the glass wall to Peter's office. "Huh?"

"If you're that bored, you can always actually do that."

Neal snorted.

"You gave Sara Ellis the Raphael she was after," Agent Burke reminded him irritably.

"Wow, news travels fast around here," Neal said. "No."

"Why not? It's not like you're ever going to use-" His eyes fell on the memglass in Neal's hand. "Hey, where did you get that?"

With a smirk, Neal lifted his other hand and wiggled all five of his fingers at the agent.

Agent Burke glanced up at the ceiling for strength. "Who did you steal it from?"

Neal had to think about it for a moment. "Big guy," he said, making a show of nonchalance as he went back to reading the file. "Put the handcuffs on when you arrested me."

"Give me that." The agent grabbed for the memglass, and Neal held it out of his reach. But he was sitting on the floor, tucked up against a wall and the side of the desk, and there really wasn't anything he could do when Agent Burke bent down and snatched it out of his grasp. He looked down at the screen, and if the agent was surprised by what he saw there, he didn't show it. With a flick of his finger, the memglass went blank and he pushed it shut, shouting, "Jones!"

The other agent's head snapped around, and when his eyes eyes bulged at the sight of the memglass in Peter's hand, Neal stretched his face into a grin and waved at him.

o0O0o

Peter closed the door to his office, trying not to let his exhaustion show, but he must not have succeeded, because Sara gave him a pained smile. "And that's the man you want me to keep around for the rest of my life. What was he reading?"

He sat down at his desk and rested his forehead in his hand. "His own file."

"Little narcissist."

"Look, you bought him," he said. "I'm just telling you not to free him."

"Where did you get the idea I was going to free him?" she demanded, which he noticed wasn't a denial.

"Oh come on," he snapped, rapidly losing patience. "He gave you the Raphael you were so desperate to find. You had to give him something for it. I'm not stupid, Sara."

Sara looked like she was on the edge of laughing in his face. "For all you know, I've had him in a shipping crate somewhere, torturing it out of him."

"Oh please."

"And what if I did promise him his freedom?" she asked. "I bought him. He's my slave."

"It's illegal," he said, utterly irrelevantly.

Sara shot him a strange look. "Would you arrest me?"

Shaking his head, Peter could feel the creeping prickles of helplessness behind his eyes. "He's just going to get caught again."

"And I'll free him again, I guess." Sara shrugged it off with a quirk of her lips. "He lucked out this time. I know that must gall you."

"No, it doesn't. It doesn't gall me." He scowled at her, headache building. _"God_ Sara. It's only going to work once."

"What?" She had the nerve to look puzzled, and it was all he could do not to throw up.

"Okay, so you free him, and he lies low for a little while, then he pulls a heist, and he gets away with it, and another, and another, and eventually he gets caught. You get him back, you free him again." Peter gritted his teeth into a sad, painful smile. "Okay, people will believe he ran. He's escaped twice before. He's a thief. They don't know why you don't have a sell on capture order on him, but oh well. We catch him again. Lo and behold, you have him for less than a day before he escapes again. He's a thief, you're an insurance investigator. You bought him knowing he's a thief. You've even recovered some of the things he's stolen. The FBI starts getting suspicious. Maybe he's stealing for you, they think. They arrest you. Somebody catches Neal. Now, he's escaped four times. Maybe he had his owner's help, maybe not, but he's been committing some big crimes. He's a nuisance. It's just not worth it to keep him alive. They have him put down. You're in jail, and he's dead."

Throughout his little hypothetical, he had been watching her face, watching the muscles of her jaw tighten and twitch, watching her expression shift from amusement to apprehension, and then to dread, and then at last back again to a panicked sort of amusement. "Oh _God,"_ she groaned. "You're worried about him."

"And you," he assured her unsteadily. "You're a _friend,_ Sara, I don't want to have to arrest you because of something like this." Not that he ever wanted to have to arrest her under any circumstances, or any other person with whom he had traded information over bad bureau coffee and takeout. It had to be against some kind of rule.

"Yeah, I..." She stopped, and her lips parted unwillingly into a painful kind of grin. "You're worried about me, I get that, but you're also worried about him, and I don't know how he does that to everybody, as soon as they meet him."

An echo of the realization and sick kind of hopelessness he had felt when he had learned that Neal had already been sold, and there was no way Peter could stop him from dying stole over him. "There's a little bit of a difference, arresting somebody knowing they're going to prison, and arresting somebody knowing they're going to _die,"_ he insisted, and when the words emerged from him as more a squeak than a growl, he set his jaw and refused to walk away from them. Even when he could see in his mind, a man, a kid really, cocky and smirking, and handing him a green sucker. The man was a con artist. That was all it was. He was good at his job, and his job was to make people like him.

"Do you actually _arrest_ slaves? I thought they were retrieved." Like a lost puppy, or a misplaced necklace.

Peter watched her smile, and try to distract, and felt a little sorry for her. "That's not the point."

"No, I know." Sara heaved a sigh. "God, Peter, what do you want me to do, keep him? I don't think that's even possible, now that Kate knows where he is, and besides what do I do with him? I don't really want him living in my apartment for the rest of his life. when I bought him, I didn't expect to be stuck with him forever."

"Sara..." He hesitated over how to put into words what he wanted to say, and when he thought he had finally found the words, they slipped away.

"Don't 'Sara' me." Her mouth twisted. "You're the one who just told me why all of my carefully constructed plans won't work."

"Sell Neal to me," he blurted.

For a few seconds, she didn't react. "What?"

"Sell Neal to me," he repeated, the words coming a little easier now that he had started. "I'll figure out how to keep him from escaping. I can put him to work here. He'll be useful, I could even convince him to give up the rest of what he's stolen."

Her expression told him she didn't buy it. "I guess I'm not the only one with carefully constructed plans."

That fear that had clenched inside him since he had first thought Neal had been sold away gnawed at his insides, and he could almost bring himself to hate her for the way that fear didn't seem to touch her. "Sara..."

"I told you not to 'Sara' me," she said with an undercurrent of strange, unsettling laughter. "It's-"

"Sara." The word came out of him too sharp, and too angry, but they brought her up short, and Peter couldn't help feeling a little too satisfied about that. "This isn't a joke!"

"I know that! God, Peter, just give me some time to think. You drop this on me, and..." An echo of his own fear flashed across her face, and disappeared again behind a pained grin. "I'll think about it, okay?"


	5. Chapter 5

00316618525

Part V

As the elevator door rumbled closed, shutting out the bright sunlit office, Sara collapsed against the side of the elevator like a sapling used to leaning on a stake that had been suddenly torn away. "Let's get some paint."

Neal stared at her nonplussed. "What?"

"I have the line art for a certain Raphael on my wall," she said without looking at him. "Don't you want to finish it before you go?"

Neal cracked his knuckles and rested the back of his head in his palms. "That depends. Are you going to paint it over as soon as I'm gone?"

"Nah. I think I'm going to like having it there. Every time I look at it, it'll remind me that I made you give me the real one." She stuck her tongue out at him. "I beat you."

"Oh come on," he groaned. "If Adler hadn't shown up, you'd have nothing."

"You would have gotten bored of my apartment eventually."

"Yeah, you're right." His eyes finally managed to find hers and latched on. "Which was why I'd already started working on escaping."

Sara's skin prickled, and all at once, the elevator seemed to be too small, too hot, and drained of air, but the wall behind her burned with cold. "Was it working?"

Neal's shoulders rose and fell with disinterested shrug. "Don't know. It's a moot point anyway." He looked away from her, far away from her. "Once this is all over, I have to ask a certain friend of mine if he got my message." Then, he glanced back at her, eyes bright and sharp, his faraway look gone without a trace. "But it's not like I would have stopped if I had failed. I'd just try something different next time."

Sara felt as if the air itself were pinning her down. It didn't matter if she sold him to Peter or not. None of them could hold him, no one could, not if he didn't want to be. And why would he want to be? Why would anybody? And he was going to keep escaping until they killed him, and if Agent Burke thought he could stop that from happening, she didn't want to hang around to watch him try. She didn't want to see it happen. "So do you want to finish the mural before you go?"

He nodded.

"Then let's go get you some paint."

o0O0o

There wasn't a whole lot Neal wouldn't have done right about then for some good scaffolding. The footstool had worked much better when he had been working with just the marker, but now that he had his paint, it was a little crowded up-

The doorbell let out a loud, raucous peal, starling him, and causing him to jerk back, sending his can of paint spinning off the footstool and dragging his computerized paintbrush on its little plastic tube down with it. He watched it fall. When it landed, the paintbrush let out a small squirt of greenish paint onto the drop cloth.

Neal swore, like a free man and not like a slave, with all the strange and colorful words he had ever learned from Keller, Kate, and Mozzie, and a host of marks over the years. And Adler. Because that was who was at the door. There was no one else who would come to the door like that. The grocery delivery came Tuesday evenings after Sara got off work, and no one else had ever come to her home. No one.

And if he felt a jab of sympathy for Sara and her lonely little life, he would never tell her, because she had been willing to drag him into it by force.

And if, after all this time, a slave's curses were still the ones waiting on the tip of his tongue, it didn't matter so long as he never let them loose, as long as he kept up appearances.

Pressing the button that made the footstool retract back down to the floor, Neal stared at the door and waited, and as soon as his feet hit drop cloth, he padded around the wet paint to answer it. "Hello, Vincent," he said, gathering up all of his false cheer, "What brings you here today?"

"Hello Neal." This time, he had flowers, a nice, if not spectacular bouquet, and with his sharp clothes and neat hair, he looked like a man who had come home to surprise his lover for a lunch date, not at all like someone who would make the hairs on the back of Neal's neck rise.

He had always made the hair on the back of Neal's neck rise, but once, he had attributed it to the thrill of the con.

"What are you doing here?" He let his voice grow just a little chill. "I told you the last time that Sara Ellis wouldn't let a fugitive from justice into her home."

"Ah, but Neal, that was before she agreed to my little business proposal. Clearly she can't find me that repugnant if she's willing to entangle her affairs in mine?" He chuckled. "However briefly."

For Neal, the easiest way to fake an emotion, had always been to make himself feel it, so Neal felt himself go cold. "Business proposal?"

Adler's lips curved up. "Your sale."

Neal let his mouth drop open just a little and his hand fall away from the door frame. "What?"

"Oh, she didn't tell you?" Adler clapped his hands together with delight. Neal's eyes took in the sight of the man's fingers, folding over each other, and his stomach writhed. "We agreed on a price this morning."

Neal's face felt hot and cold, as if Adler had struck him there instead of spoken. "But-"

"You know, my sources tell me Sterling Bosch has the Raphael she was charged with retrieving. I suppose you must have given it to her." He swept past Neal into the apartment and turned back to him, as if he had just thought of something, instead of having prepared the blow hours before. "Did she promise you your freedom for it?"

It was easy, just then, to imagine that Sara really had sold him out, and Adler was going to take him away somewhere he could never escape from, and he let the betrayal wash over and through him, leaving him shaking and gasping, and burying the knowledge that he was safe, and he was working with Sara, and everything was going according to plan. "I don't believe it," he whispered.

"Now really Neal." Adler's smile filled with a false, _hateful_ condescending kindness as he puttered around Sara's kitchen. "You know better than anyone that just because someone has nice clothes, a nice job, and a squeaky clean name doesn't make them honest. Is there a vase around here for the flowers?"

Neal shut the door and shoved himself away from it, shaking. "I don't think she has any."

Smug satisfaction radiated off him. "Oh, I'm sure you'll manage, Neal, you always do."

Neal's whole body vibrated with the knowledge that _this man thought he was going to own him._ He... Before Sara, when it had been a corporation that had held title to him, there had been no one person he could point to and say _this person thinks they can own me._ All over the world, there were more than a billion slaves, owned by corporations, owned by the Global Federation, a few thousand, a handful, owned by the extraordinarily wealthy to take care of their oversized estates. So many people owned, and so few ready to say they did the owning.

And Adler was a man willing to say he did the owning. This was the man who thought he could buy and sell Neal and keep him as property. He was one of those extraordinarily wealthy people, and he might have lived outside the law, but he insisted others follow it when it put them into his power. And even if he hadn't been, Neal remembered how accustomed Adler was to seeing other people, slaves and free, as possessions.

Neal grabbed a glass out of the cabinet and thunked it down onto the counter.

"What are you going to do with that?" Adler had a gift for making his voice pleasant and cruel all at once.

"Manage." Neal plucked the flowers out of his hands and arranged them in the glass, then filled it with water from the sink. "Good thing you didn't get a nice big bouquet that wouldn't fit in a kitchen glass."

Adler let out a puff of surprised laughter. "I think this is going to be fun, don't you?"

Neal tamped down on his disgust. "A blast."

"Don't sulk, Neal," he scolded. "This doesn't have to be so terrible. I know it's not what you were planning, but I have a compound on the Western Mediterranean where I could put you. I think you would like it there, blue water, nice weather, perfect light for painting..." He trailed off, favoring Neal with a small smile. "You're very fortunate to be so talented in something you enjoy. Oh, you'll have to give up the con, of course, but your artistic and technical skills will be extremely useful to my little operation."

Neal wondered if that was supposed to sound appealing, or if the revoltion running down his spine was exactly the reaction Adler was aiming for. He didn't know. If he could just read Adler like a normal person, they wouldn't even be here.

"It's close enough to Paris and Rome, you could take my plane for day trips if you ask nicely." Adler said, as if he didn't notice the pause he had left, and the way Neal hadn't filled the silence. "That collar of yours, doesn't need to be a collar. No one would have to see it. We can fit it around your wrist or your ankle. It wouldn't even ruin the line of your suits."

Neal sucked air in through his nose, trying desperately to keep his roiling stomach from emptying itself onto Sara's kitchen counter. "Well, as long as it doesn't even ruin the line of my suits."

Adler's face grew sharp, transfiguring in an instant from covertly to overtly menacing. "Careful, Neal. With an attitude like that, I might start to worry that you're going to fight me, and your life could become very unpleasant. And that would be entirely your fault, would it?"

"Yes, Vincent," Neal assured him. "Of course."

o0O0o

As soon as the door closed behind Adler, Neal bolted to the drop cloth and snatched his paintbrush and paint up into his arms. With his feet on the footstool, and his hand around the paintbrush, his nose a foot away from the multicolored swirls of paint, it was easier to steady himself and breathe, and remind himself that Adler was never going to own him. It was a con like any other, and in a week's time, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, he would be free. There, as he painted the mural he had once used to taunt Sara, but that she was buying him the supplies to paint, it was easier to remind himself that she had already taken him to the FBI. He had proof of her good intentions, even if he didn't understand them, and Adler's cold assertions about her could evaporate and float away. As he rushed to finish the mural that Sara could paint over the moment he was out her door if she chose, it was easier to remind himself of the world outside Sara's apartment walls, and that Kate and Mozzie, and probably that kid Barbra and her brother, if Mozzie was the softie Neal knew him secretly to be, would be waiting for him there. It was easier to remember that he would be out of there, with them, gone like leaves in the wind.

But what he wanted right then, his stomach twisting into knots, was a memglass, or an old style phone, or a carrier pigeon, or a crystal ball, to call Sara and tell her that _Adler had been in her home again._

o0O0o

"You can't just keep them off the grid, Moz," Kate groaned in frustration, rubbing her face with one hand.

"Why not?" he squawked. "I went off the grid when I was their age, never did me any harm!"

Barbra glanced over at her brother, sitting on the other side of the room, his arms wrapped around a stuffed dinosaur, covered in clean, bright, fuzzy white and brown fake feathers. A few months ago, he had told her he was too big for stuffed animals, and abandoned the grimy, filthy, almost unrecognizable stuffed bunny she had rescued for him when she was first old enough to work the compactors. A brand new stuffed animal of his very own was just too much to resist, she supposed. She didn't blame him, since she was definitely too old for stuffed animals, too old for toys at all, old enough for acne and for the overseers to make comments on her growing breasts, old enough according to the slave women to take care of her brother alone, and she wouldn't have said no to her own soft, fluffy, clean stuffed animal.

Kate's lips stretched into a grimace. "Yeah, no harm at all," she bit out.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Mozzie's voice rose high and squeaky, and Barbra's eyes locked onto her brother's. It was all she could do not to run to him, or at least open her arms and let him run to her as his eyes darted back and forth between the man who had taken the chips out of their backs and the woman who had fed them, clothed them, and given them a bed to sleep in. She found her eyes following his, and all she could do was try to remind him silently to keep still and not draw attention to the two of them, because these were free people, and they could always just turn them in if they were trouble.

"Forget it, Moz." Kate sat down next to Angelo with a sigh. "Look, what if they grow up and don't want to be crooks like us?"

"You know, I've been saying since I met you, that you're just not committed to this lifest-"

Kate's face flushed red. "This isn't a noble crusade against the system, Moz, it's a life of crime. It's making our living by stealing things from other people. If I get caught, and they charge me with half of what I've done, I'm going to jail for the rest of my life, same as you. Don't you dare play the 'who's more of a con' game with me." And she dropped her voice so that Barbra had to struggle to hear her. "What if _they_ get caught, Moz? If they do want to be crooks like us, I want the worst thing that can happen to them be that they go to jail, not that they die in slavery, so let's just find a way to get them scrubbed out of the slave database and get them new identities now."

Barbra felt frozen. Slowly, almost against her will, she stood up and crossed the room to stand next to her brother, trying not to stare at Kate. "You don't have to do anything for us, I mean we could just go," she said, but the prospect filled her with dread.

"There you see?" Mozzie shouted triumphantly. "They don't want to be on the grid, you're just trying to force everybody to do what society wants!"

"Oh for crying out loud, Moz, just shut-"

And that's when Kate's memglass started singing opera from inside her pocket.

o0O0o

Kate darted into the bathroom and closed the door before answering the call. Adler's face gazed back at her. "Hello, Vincent, she whispered, forcing away her hesitation.

"Hello, Kate," he replied cheerfully. "How do I find you this fine afternoon?"

"Very well, Vincent, and you?" The pleasantries rolled off her tongue automatically, even as her stomach churned.

"Can't complain," Adler chuckled. "Anyway, I've made arrangements to pick up your boy tomorrow, and I know how important it would be to the both of you for you to come along." Kate tried to speak. "I won't take no for an answer."

"Thank you, Vincent," she said, giving voice to the only option left to her.

"Excellent." He clapped his hands together. "I'll send someone to retrieve you tomorrow, around eight. Sweet dreams, Kate."

He didn't wait for her to say goodbye before the connection ended.

Shaking, Kate rose from the lip of the tub and grasped the bathroom doorknob. Her hand, slick with sweat and worry almost slid off of it before she managed to turn it. It swung open. Queasy, Kate set the memglass on the counter and walked out, shutting the door behind her. With calm deliberance, she strode into her bedroom and palmed the pen and pad of paper from her night table, the ones Mozzie had once upon a time insisted she use until it became so much of a habit that after Neal, she had kept using them. She carried them back with her into the kitchen and sitting room.

Mozzie was waiting for her, bouncing up and down a little on his toes, irate. "Was that a hacker?"

"No," she said, brow furrowed.

"Don't lie to me!" he yelled shrilly. "You're planning to get them paperwork no matter what I say, and put us all back on the grid, aren't you?"

"Not now, Moz," she hissed, and scrawled _"I need your help,"_ on the paper before passing it to him. The kids watched her curiously, sitting on the couch stiffly, and Kate knew they were probably terrified to draw her attention. She caught their eyes and pointed at the bedroom, and the girl, Barbra, grabbed her brother and sped out of the room with him. It wasn't normal. It should probably worry her, that level of compliance, but right then, she was too relieved to be anything but grateful. "It was just Adler," she said to Mozzie. "He's made the deal. We're picking up Neal together tomorrow."

"Oh, that's nice," Mozzie grumbled. "I'd been trying to forget about your little deal with the devil. I guess there's no point in staying off the grid anyway if you've got us all working for Adler." He passed the paper back to her expectantly, and Kate held in a sigh of relief to hear false irritation overtake the anger he had felt before.

"Oh come on, Moz, are we really going to go over that again? Let's just have a nice, quiet night and watch a movie. Look, we can watch _Tiles of Fire Seven,_ okay?" She looked over at the man who had taught her how to hold a pen, and wrote, _"It's a sting. The FBI's going to be at the exchange to arrest Adler."_

She watched his face turn purple, and his hand shake around the pen. She snatched it away from him, to quickly write, _"Neal called them in, not me, I swear!"_

Swallowing, Mozzie took back the pen. _"But you knew!"_

 _"I'm not supposed to be there tomorrow! The FBI doesn't know."_ Kate ignored his outrage and glanced at the remote, and Mozzie took the hint, turning the movie on. The hologram sprang up around them.

 _"Call them, then. I don't see why you need my help."_

 _"He's probably tracing my calls. I can't risk it."_

 _"That's what burner glasses are for. If you think he's bugged your place, call from somewhere else."_

She grimaced. _"He just called one of my burners. I don't know how he traced it, but if he has one... And Adler's got to be watching me. If I leave, he'll know something's up."_

Mozzie looked at her for a long, long time before plucking the pen out of her hand and writing what had to be the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. _"What do you need?"_

 _"When you leave tonight, I need you to take the kids and go to a safehouse that I have never been to, and I need you to call Peter Burke and tell him I'm going to be at the exchange tomorrow."_

 _"Neal's pet fed? That's who's in on this?"_

Kate looked at him wryly. _"You willing to call him and sacrifice a memglass for me?"_

He nodded.

Kate could have hugged him. Instead, she kept writing. _"Once this is over, we'll lie low at your safehouse for a little while, and then we're getting the hell out of New York. How's Cairo sound?"_

He grabbed her hand and kissed it, before drawing her into a one-armed hug and sitting back with her to watch the movie.

o0O0o

After the credits had rolled, Kate sat on the couch and watched numbly as Mozzie fetched the kids out of her room and bundled them out the door. They said their goodbyes by rote for anyone listening in, and she had never been so grateful as she was then for Mozzie's paranoia. If he never went anywhere by straight route, if he always switched pods and doubled back to throw people off his trail, it wouldn't look suspicious when he did it tonight. And if they all made it through this okay, she was never going to say another word about it.

As soon as they were gone, she went into her bedroom, probably for the last time, and stared out the window until she could finally bring herself to fall into an exhausted sleep.

o0O0o

Peter drummed his fingers against his arm as the tech slid a needle under the skin of Neal's hip. "We figure Adler will want to put his own collar and chip on you As soon as possible," he told him. "This ensures that once your old one's off, we can still track you. It can't paralyze you like a normal chip, it won't, I don't know, explode, it'll just tell us where you are."

Neal gritted his teeth as the tracker spread and thinned under his skin, until there was no discernible sign of its presence except the set of his jaw as he made a poor attempt at his usual blinding grin. "Okay."

Peter waited for the tech to pack away the syringe and leave, before continuing. "I got a call last night from someone who I'm going to guess was," he paused. "One of your associates telling me that Adler is sending Kate Moreau to pick you up."

Neal's head whipped up. "What?"

"It shouldn't be a problem," Peter rushed to reassure him, uncrossing his arms and holding his palms open to Caffrey. "We anticipated that Adler would want her to be with him when he met you, so we already have plans to get her to safety if we have to. Her coming to meet you will actually make it easier."

Neal took a breath to steady himself, and for an instant, fear flitted across his face before he flashed a strained smile. Peter allowed himself to curse inwardly. There Neal was, off his game and being obvious, and that was the last thing Peter needed. "So this is an FBI pep talk, huh?" Neal said, smile becoming sharper, and more natural, if no more pleasant. "I guess that means I'm a real boy today."

Still pouring over the disaster that a less than perfect Neal Caffrey could mean for the operation, Peter found himself caught off guard. His eyes squinted down into a confused scowl. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're giving me explanations, reassurances, telling me your plans..." All of a sudden, there it was, the blinding, flawless Neal Caffrey grin. "This isn't how you're supposed to treat slaves you know. This is how you treat people." Neal wagged his finger. "I don't think you're supposed to be thinking of me that way, Agent Burke, naughty naughty."

A piece of Peter, unmoored and floating free from the rest of him was too busy heaving a sigh of relief that Neal was with it enough to catch him off guard to be as infuriated as the rest of him with the net of deceptive vulnerabilities and vicious, swirling innuendos that forced Peter to confirm, "As a person."

"That's right," Caffrey sang.

"Caffrey-"

"That's not my name," Neal cut him off.

"What?" And as Peter said it, he wondered if he was ever going to get used to the way conversations twisted and turned around Neal, until they were talking about exactly what he wanted to.

"It's not my name. I don't have a name," Neal said brightly. "I have a number."

"Oh for the love of..." There was a headache brewing jest between Peter's eyes. "Caffrey, I need to talk to you about something."

"I'm all ears, Agent Burke." He kept smiling, but the muscles in his jaw jumped, and Peter would have loved just to know if that inkling of emotion was real, or something else Neal had learned to fake.

Peter gave him a weak scowl. "I know you gave Sara the Raphael. I know that when this is over, I know Sara plans to let you go, and you're going to run. Don't."

"Peter, I-"

Peter lifted his hand to forestall the rest of what he was going to say. "I asked Sara to sell you to me instead."

"Wow," Neal whispered. "I take back what I said about you acting like I'm a human being."

Peter could feel any chance he had to convince the man slipping through his fingers like water off an ice cube, and with it, he could feel a thin thread of anger, because why should he have to convince Caffrey to do what was best for himself? "You're going to get yourself killed," he snapped quietly, shaking. "Eventually, they're going to put you down."

Neal didn't blink. "Everybody dies someday, Peter."

"Yeah, but-" most people put some effort into holding it off for as long as they could.

"Peter," Neal cut in, voice packed full of steely charm. "If you're really concerned about improving my life expectancy, maybe you should concentrate on getting me through today."

Peter scowled, that feeling of thwarted fear floating distantly in his mind. He opened his mouth, an it stayed hanging that way for a few long seconds, before he remembered how to launch himself into his plan rundown. Neal nodded as he spoke, and asked questions, and in the back of Peter's mind, he thought to himself that Neal would have made the ideal student, if ever he'd had the chance to go to school, at least until the teachers turned their backs. "The important thing to remember," Peter said at last, "Is that once you get to Adler, press the skin over your tracker. It has pressure sensors in it, and as soon as you give the signal, we move in. After that, it's Kate and your jobs to get out of the way. Just put your hands up and get behind the FBI line." His skin prickled with apprehension. "Neal, whatever you're planning, save it until after."

The grin was cocky and too bright, with a razor edge when he said, "Sure, Peter."

"Just don't do anything to compromise the operation. You want Adler arrested, let us do that. Don't do anything until the people with guns are gone." Peter tried not to sigh, or let his exasperation, or the way he wanted to shake Neal until his brain rattled around in his skull and maybe, possibly fell back into place so he didn't keep trying to get himself killed, show. "After that, I don't care."

"Aww, you do care," Neal said knowingly, a new grin beginning to spread across his face. "And not just because it's a crime and I'm a very naughty boy. You actually _care."_

"Okay, fine." It felt as if the words had exploded out of him, but it must have been a very small explosion, because nobody else seemed to notice. "I care and I don't want you to get yourself kill-"

Shaking his head, Neal cut him off. "Could you do it?"

Peter massaged his forehead in frustration. "Do what?" he demanded.

"Be a slave." Neal gave a soft snort, and locked eyes with him. When he started speaking again, his eyes bored into Peter's like surgical knives. "Give up everything you've ever done, leave your wife, and your friends, because somebody thinks they get to own you.

"It wouldn't be a bad life, working for me. Better than prison, which is where you'd be right now if you weren't a slave."

"That's not what I'm asking," Neal retorted, deceptively gentle. "Could you do it? You're asking me to, so could you?"

Peter glanced down, just for a moment. And Neal... When he looked up, Neal was smiling, but there was no triumph in it. It was a sad smile, as if he didn't think he had really won, or if there wasn't any winning to be done. It looked so real, and Peter wished, hoped, it was. It would have been dangerous if he let himself think he could tell.

o0O0o

Kate stepped out of the door before the two goons who had come to pick her up could ring the bell. She smiled at them carefully and held out her hand. "Shall we, gentlemen?"

When neither of them took her offered arm, she pulled it back, only long practice giving the gesture the poise to imply that _they_ were the ones who had made the misjudgment, not her. She followed them to the three small airplanes, perched delicately on the walkway in front of her apartment.

Adler opened the door to one with a gracious smile, amusement flickering in his eyes.

"Good morning, Vincent," she said in her best con voice. She hoped he didn't recognize it. He'd never actually seen her pulling a con before.

"You look lovely this morning, my dear," he answered as she slid into the airplane, tucking her feet beneath her, under the seat. She smiled back at him, and didn't mention that none of it was for him.

As he closed the door behind her goons and walked away, a spark of unease flared within her, but she did her best to ignore it in favor of enjoying a little more time without him in it. It was simply unexpected. It only made her nervous because the unexpected just reminded her that this was Adler's show, not hers. That was all.


	6. Chapter 6

00316618525

Part VI

Sara's fingertip skated across the memglass surface, trailing a swirling line of black behind it. When she was finished, she handed it back to the same woman with the graying ponytail and vaguely menacing manner she had met with before. "Pleasure doing business with you."

"Of course." She didn't bother to hide her boredom or her disbelief. "The money will be transferred to your account by midnight."

Sara gave a satisfied nod, and with one last glance at Neal, she walked away. She wished she hadn't. He was there, standing stiff as stone, face frozen, completely unable to move. She wondered if he had chosen that expression of blank fear and despair, if it was a deliberate facade meant to satisfy Adler and his people, or if it was real, and he wasn't willing, or possible able, to hide it. If maybe this was it, and the cracks in his that had become so obvious to her, had finally widened into chasms that let his real skin show through.

Outside, she waited for an empty pod and stepped inside before opening her memglass. As the door thunked shut behind her, she punched in a number and waited for an answer.

"Hello?"

"Agent Burke?" she said, keeping her voice steady. "Is that offer to buy Neal still on the table?"

o0O0o

There was a part of Neal that always stayed detached from the rest of what he was thinking and feeling, whispering to him that this little office, with its big picture windows looking out over the windmills surrounding the city, and the decorative rugs over decent fake wood floors, was meant to be good enough for the agents of people who could buy slaves, or mid-level corporate employees. That the lack of clutter or personalization to it meant it was probably set aside to be used for just this kind of deal between two independent parties. He had to wonder just how often a big slave dealing firm really needed to use this kind of room. That part of him kept itself busy while the rest of him quietly fought to keep from going to pieces.

In a way, the chip was a mercy. Without it, he never would have been able to stop the shivering he knew his body was just waiting to unleash. This way, he couldn't. This way he got to keep the illusion of a little dignity as two of the firm's hired hands wheeled in a table, picked him up and strapped him to it, and wheeled him out of the office and down a hallway. They passed through an employees only door, and the soft lighting and bland paintings vanished in favor of blank walls and harsh industrial lighting. Paralyzed, Neal waited through the elevator ride, and the trip down another back hallway, the cold from the table seeping into him, until at last they pushed him through a door and hooked a mask to his face, the now-familiar smell of gas carrying him away.

o0O0o

When Neal woke up again, Adler's face floated fuzzily above him. "Hello Neal."

"Adler," he slurred.

Adler smiled at him indulgently. "It's good to have you back with us."

Neal desperately wanted to ask if that was a royal we Adler was using. "Where's Kate?"

"In that plane, behind and to the left." He cocked his head toward the window. When Neal tried to sit up so see, he pushed his new purchase back down onto the plush bench he had been lying on and tucked the blanket up around his chin. Neal's head spun. "I have a residence in town where I've been staying while I arranged your acquisition. We'll be spending the night there. Speaking of which, Neal, I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I made coming to New York to retrieve you myself."

Neal didn't trust himself to answer with the anesthesia still clouding his brain. Instead he shrugged off Adler's hand and stretched, sliding one hand down to scratch his hip, sore where the tracker rested just under the skin. He pressed his thumb into it hard. It stung, but he refused to let himself tense or grit his teeth. Adler might see.

In the back of his mind, he was already picturing exactly where he needed to make the cut to pop the tracker right out.

Adler filled the silence after a thoughtful pause. "You're going to have to accept that you will have a leash now, Neal. If you work with me, that leash can be a lot longer."

Neal's eyes flicked up to him. "Where are my clothes?"

"Gone. Lost during the transfer. I did bring something appropriate for you to wear." There was something a little too knowing, and a little too satisfied in Adler's face when he answered. He gestured to a folding screen, curtaining off a corner of the cabin.

Neal suppressed the sullen glance he wanted to give Adler before snatching up the blanket and wrapping it around himself, throwing it over his shoulders like a cape and scuttling off to hide behind the screen as fast as possible while still, uh, preserving his modesty. On hangers hooked to the top edge of the screen was a pale gray suit, including a waistcoat and white dress shirt. On a shelf sat underwear and socks, and pearl cuff links. Neal scanned all of it with an eye that belonged as much to a slave as to a thief, and no matter how drugged he was, there was no way he could fail to recognize this for what it was, a bribe.

Hr didn't know of it was meant to be a threat too, or if Adler just didn't understand that people found it creepy when people they hadn't seen in years had clothes perfectly tailored to their exact measurements waiting for them. Or that Neal would find it a little unsettling to find a near perfect replica of one of the first suits Adler had ever bought him, altered ti fit his now older, less scrawny frame. Either way, it definitely made it clear just what place Adler envisioned for him.

Neal caught sight of the memglass shackling his left ankle. For a moment, the picture of Adler being forced to kneel down in front of him to program it twisted his mouth into a small bitter smile, until he remembered the far more satisfying fact that if this all went to plan, Adler would spend the rest of his life in prison, never touching another memglass again.

He dressed slowly, his fingers fumbling with buttons and zippers, struggling to pull the fabric straight when his brain wasn't even sure what way he should be pulling it. At last, holding back a groan of frustration, he stepped into the oh-so-expensive-and-understated shoes waiting under the table and walked out from behind the screen.

Adler came forward to unbutton Neal's shirt and put the buttons through the right holes, and tug everything into place. Before he stepped back, he squeezed Neal's shoulders in what was probably intended to be a reassuring way, but even if he had been able to take some comfort from the gesture, it would have been quickly dispersed by the way Adler just stood back and looked at him, like a thing he owned, but more than that. Like a curio piece he had just found the right spot on the shelf for. The rake of Adler's eyes over him was so close to being a tangible thing that Neal couldn't help being surprised that they didn't leave some kind of residue, a clinging, oily something to mark their passage.

Neal swallowed and looked back at him, until he couldn't stand it anymore and too a seat. Adler gave him a last beaming smile before taking his own seat, his bodyguards clustering in around him.

o0O0o

Gradually, the anesthesia fog over his brain began to lift, more gradually than Neal would have liked, still, by the time the plane engaged its landing gear, he had enough of himself back to put on a con face and smile in Adler's general direction. And to plan.

The plane docked into a specially made berth with the kind of smooth motion and gentle landing that spoke of tremendous expense. Behind them, the plane carrying Kate landed just as smoothly, just as effortlessly into the berth as Neal followed Adler and his guards out of the plane.

The hangar itself was less ostentatious, gray concrete floors, gray concrete walls, sloped gray concrete ceiling, and numbered columns of more gray concrete propping up the whole structure, a relatively small and utterly unadorned place to house his expensive toys. Neal surveyed it all, then fixed his gaze on Kate's plane, waiting breathlessly as the wings folded up and back, like a bird coming to roost, and the door opened. Kate stepped down, flanked by two more of Adler's bodyguards, and when she looked up, "Neal!"

She broke away from them and hurtled herself at Neal, grabbing him into the kind of embrace that wasn't do much about showing affection as it was about making sure the person in her arms was real and really there. She held on for a long moment, just looking at him, before leaning in and breathing, almost to soft even for him to hear,"Did you signal the FBI?"

He nodded. He could feel her body relaxing against him.

"He put you in a suit," she said a little louder, faint, desperate laughter creeping into her voice.

"Yep," he told her, trying to keep his voice light. "He did."

"FBI, drop your weapons!"

Neal didn't even have time to register the command before waves of agents seemingly materialized out from behind photoscreens. One of Adler's bodyguards, a broad shouldered woman with gray-blond hair, yanked Kate away, her laser gun pointed straight at the side of her head. Another guard had him, his hands trapped behind his back as the FBI poured into the suddenly cramped hangar.

"Did you do this Neal?" Adler yelled over the clamor. When Neal shrugged, Adler's lips pulled back in an animal expression of fury and hate. "It wouldn't have been so bad, Neal, but you had to try to squirm out, didn't you, you had-"

"Drop your weapons!" Peter Burke shouted through a microphone, but Neal had a feeling they all would have been able to hear him just fine without it. He had a veritable wall of exoskeleton armored agents behind him, thirty or fifty. Neal, who had felt as if there had been an army bearing down on him at his own arrest, but had been taken in by only ten agents, felt almost jealous. "Vincent Adler, you are under arrest. Right now the charges are investment fraud, and we both know you'll get out in a couple years, and then you can go back to enjoying all the wealth you've got hidden away in peace. Or, if you really want us to, we can add kidnap, assault with a deadly weapon, resisting arrest... What do you say Adler, going to come quietly or not?"

Adler cocked his head and, with a smile that missed easygoing by a mile and landed deep into frightening, said "Neither, I think. I have no indention of being arrested today, and since my getaway vehicle is right here..." He waved back at the planes. "My associates, including Miss Moreau, will be leaving on that plane. Everyone will remain alive, and we will both be only minorly inconvenienced. I hope that's something you can live with."

"This is why you brought me along, isn't it?" Kate demanded. "In case you needed a hostage. You can't use Neal, no one would care if you destroyed your own property."

"Hush, Kate." Adler kept his eyes on Agent Burke. He flicked his hand casually at the guard aiming her gun at Kate's head. She pulled Kate along, up to the door of the plane Neal had ridden in with Adler.

"I called in the FBI," Kate tried distracting him. "I offered to help them find you if they would help me find Neal."

"Oh Kate." Adler didn't even bother to look at her as he pulled out a memglass and pulled it open. "You really shouldn't lie about that kind of thing. Now, agents, I have a small going away present for all of you, in the form of a series of bombs. Th-"

The sizzling snap of two laser gun blasts ripped through the air, cutting off the rest of what he was going to say. Neal's head jerked up to see Kate, slumped in the arms of Adler's guard as Adler himself toppled over, half of the back of his head blown clean off, his hand landing with a smack onto the memglass he had been holding.

The memglass let out an earsplitting siren squeal, which was the only warning they had. The guard holding Neal dropped him and dove for cover. Neal rolled behind the partition wall. The whole hangar seemed to erupt with noise and hot, pounding fire. The walls shook and cracked apart, jolting Neal out of his huddle, and sending bits of concrete and metal bars raining down from the ceiling. As the noise subsided, Neal swore he could hear shouting through the ringing in his ears.

o0O0o

Neal woke up to the sensation of a hand on the side of his neck, the thumb jabbing in. He scrambled away, eyes snapping open. "Moz?"

"Just checking for your pulse." Mozzie wore an FBI jacket and a pair of gloves, and for a moment of fleeting paranoia, Neal wondered if he really was a secret government agent.

"Who'd you swipe the jacket off of?"

A small, almost mean, smirk crept onto Mozzie's face before he waved Neal off nonchalantly. "They keep extras in their fake utility pod."

"Bad policy," Neal panted. He felt as if his chest was being squeezed, like he couldn't breathe. "Someone could just slip right in and take one."

Mozzie held up the chip remover. "You want that thing off?"

Neal untucked his shirt and lifted it and his jacket up to show the chip embedded in the base of his back. Mozzie pressed the chip remover to it and pulled the chip out with a faint pop. "Tracker," Neal rasped. "There's a tracker too."

"Where?"

Neal touched his hip. Mozzie handed him a small utility knife, and he dug it into the skin over the tracker. One sharp squeeze sent blood and the gel tracker pouring out onto the broken concrete ground.

"There is no way that's sanitary," Mozzie grimaced when Neal tried to hand the knife back to him. "We need to get you out of here so we can clean that thing out and you don't die of sepsis."

Neal closed his eyes. "Kate?" he asked, but it wasn't a question, more like a plea, for Mozzie to tell him it wasn't true, for Kate to walk up to meet them.

"I'm sorry, man." Mozzie's arm wrapped around him in an awkward half hug. "I heard them talking, she was right next to the bomb. She was torn to shreds."

"I saw her go down before that," Neal choked out. "Headshot."

"I'm sorry, man," Mozzie repeated. "Look, I know you just fainted, but we got to get out of here. Your pet suit is up and talking, and he's going to start asking about you soon."

Neal nodded, not trusting himself to speak again.

"You know," Mozzie said as he helped Neal to his feet, "That bomb was kind of a good thing for us. Keeps the FBI distracted."

Oh yes, the bomb that had torn Kate to shreds. "Don't, Moz."

Mozzie fell silent and Neal let him lead him out the back of the hangar and out across Adler's small park of garden, and into one of the city tower pillars. Three flights of stairs later, they emerged to the evening, a light fall of drizzle, and Mozzie's waiting public pod. He let Mozzie guide him inside and sat down, closing his eyes.

"I'm all packed up," Mozzie broke the silence. "We can leave tonight, anywhere you want to go. The kids are ready."

"The kids?"

"Your messengers."

"Oh yeah." Neal tried to smile.

"Kate talked about going to Cairo," Mozzie offered tentatively.

"Yeah, Cairo," Neal mumbled. "Sounds great."


End file.
